The importance of understanding your "Why" and using storytelling to connect with customers, investors, and employees.
The video emphasizes the importance of understanding your "Why" and using storytelling to connect with customers, investors, and employees. It suggests building a community and gathering feedback through qualitative and quantitative analysis before launching a business.
The first thing before you even launch, you want to make sure that you understand your Why because the thing is that part of this business that you’re going to be launching is going to include that storytelling. It’s your personal story with it, whether you’re looking at onboarding customers, at onboarding investors, or onboarding your own employees. The next thing is, you want to make sure you are really building up the community, whether it’s either rallying up your own network, telling them about this new launch that you’re doing. It could also be a Coming Soon page that you establish where you’re starting to receive those emails, those links that you can target later on. Then you want to start testing and get feedback. Maybe that could be a qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. That’s via either getting on the phone with potential customers and asking them a set of
questions so that you can get an understanding of what they’re responding, and see if there are any patterns. Next, you want to get clear as to what is going to be the structure of your business. Is that going to be an LLC? Is that going to be a C Corp? Are you going to be registered in New York, in Delaware, in California? Typically, if you want to build a business that is hypergrowth, that you’re going to need potential money, what lawyers recommend – and obviously, you should consult with your corporate lawyer – is a C Corp. in the state of Delaware because those are the ones that investors like the most, and because most lawyers in the U.S., if not all of them, know Delaware law because that is what they teach them in law school. With that being said, you need to get clear as to what is going to be the corporate structure of your business. Next, you want to get a bank account, and
you also want to set up your credit card processor partner in the event that you’re going to be starting to accept payments. This could be like Stripe or Square or whoever that is. You need to have a clear understanding as to how you’re going to be taking that money, how you’re going to get compensated by your own customers, and you need a place where you’re depositing all of that money. With that being said, you really need that structure on the bank account and then also on the credit card processor partner that you’re going to be using to secure those payments. Next, you need to understand how much money are you really going to need to launch the business? How much money will be for the marketing or the PR or whatever you need to launch with a bang? Again, you want to leave a bit of a cushion because, at the end of the day, what you may anticipate typically tends to be a bit more.
With that in mind, make sure that you have a clear understanding of how much money is going to be required to bring it to life. The next thing is, you want to test. You want to test as much as you can. That is, maybe you have a landing page, maybe you already have the product or the service. Before you put it out there, try to get your first or second-degree connections to engage with it so that they can give you some feedback. Maybe there are some holes that are there that you haven’t seen or you’re not aware of, and that way, crowdsourcing that process of testing is really nice, and it could be super effective as you’re thinking about putting it out there on the marketplace. Then you want to do a launch event, for example. At that point, you’re inviting press; you’re inviting influencers, so to get the word out there so that people on social media are talking about it, you’re tagging
people at the event, or whatever that is, you need to get people aware. You need to get as many people talking about the launch of your product.