I read an interesting book called ‘Zero to Sold’. It is a book about how we bootstrap a business from nothing to something. This book contains lessons from the journey of a company that grow naturally without any venture investment.

Here what I learned from that book:

1. Don’t start from idea / technology

   This is a common pitfall for someone who just build a product. Building a business is not equal to building a product. To have a successful business, you need to have a clear business plan. Without a clear business plan, you’ll just build something that users don’t like. It is tempting for software engineer (like me ) to skip the planning part. The planning part includes research your audience, identify their problem, and define your solution. After finishing these three parts, we can start to create the product.

2. Research your audience

   The book introduces the concept of niche audience. Niche audience means the audience for specific field. For instances, teacher who is struggling with online teaching or new podcaster who is struggling to start a new podcast. There is an art in defining our niche audience. For a new bootstrap business, it is important to choose the niche user which has a great market opportunity but won’t invite a new competition. In other words, we should have users range who are not too wide and not too broad. Wide variety of users means it is more difficult to manage in the beginning in terms of identifying problem and defining solution. Also, we want to avoid that unnecessary competition. Our goal here is to build a business with users from specific field with great market opportunity in the future. That is the power of Niche audience.

3. Identify the pain of the audience

   After defining the audience, we can go to the problem of audiences. Normally, niche audiences will have the same pain problem. This pain problem is something that we are looking for. We need to reach out to those community of audiences in order to identify the pain. In this part, it is also tempting to make an assumption of the problem. We should avoid doing that because in the end we want to build a sustainable business where audiences have the same problem. The successful business don’t just solve the problem of one user. If we look at the giant tech company, we will see similar pattern about them. They are a company who solve the problem of many users. Amazon solves the problem of users who are looking for stuff. Facebook solves the problem of remote human connection. Stripe solves the problem of payment system. Can you see that?

4. Define and validating your solution

   Now, it is time to think about the solution for the problem from our niche users. Building a solution doesn’t mean building a full product yet. In Lean startup, the author emphasises on the importance of prototyping before deciding to go full power on creating the product. This is something that we will do. We need to validate if the solution that we will build solve the problem. In the end of the day, it is something that we can’t skip. For a sustainable business, we should have a confidence that the niche users are helped by our solution. Validating solution can be in the form of quick prototype or maybe just simply questionaire / interview. The goal here is to bring our proposed solution to the niche users and learn from that. In my personal opinion, this step is crucial before starting to create a product. Fantastic or good feedback from users can become a fuel for us as a developer to start creating the product.