The Entrepreneur's Compass: Vision, Strategy, and Execution for Sustainable Growth

Many of us are very good at executing certain activities in entrepreneurship, like in building and delivering a product or may be in operations or may be in Marketing or specific skills in that type. And many a times it’s observed that , we keep only focusing on the that particular activities without having a big picture. Big picture like, how can we see our product or services to be perceived by the users after 5 years, an inspiriting  bold goal. How are we going to achieve them realistically. These are big picture thinking, and to make a sustainable product , it’s very critical.

More than 35% of the company does not even survive after 5th years of operations.

Now, here is the importance of the Vision and Mission.

Creating Vision statement , not only helps to keep our actions toward a common goal, but also it helps to attract other various integral part of the company , like getting buy-in from the investors or sponsors , attracting right talent etc.

How do we create a Vision statement. Normally Vision statement is bold and inspirational and it directs all the activities in a particular direction. It is like a guiding principles for your product or company.

Vision: We were helping on the Health Tech company in India to help every corporate professionals to live a fit lifestyle even in their busy schedules.

Mission:IF mission is a statement, then how can we define a Mission . Mission statement is noting but a realistically how much can you accomplish to meet your mission. For us, it was to help 10,000 corporate professionals to stay fit within first year of our product launch.

Goal:Now, based on the product lifecycle, be it in the customer discovery, early adapters or product market fit, we all chase for different and specific goals. 

Eg. For an early stage product innovation, your main goal may be to acquire first 10,000 users within a year, and in this case customer acquisition can your major Goal.

If you are already in product-market fit, you may want to maintain a ARR of 10 Crs .

This will be your Goal.

Strategies:

Now the critical part comes, the strategy.

Strategy comes in every phase of product lifecycle. However, it’s very critical during the product discovery stage itself. Once you have a sold conviction in your discovery phase, rest of the part will follow eventually. 

Now, before even thinking to build a product , you need to make lots of decisions. 

In out last health tech product, as it was to decide the right customer pain points that we can solve based on our feasibility capacity and also baed on the urgency that the user may want to get solved.

After interacting with many of product leaders and start up advisors, we realized that most start up builds products that no users wants and eventually fails. You don’t want to do that. So customer discovery is a crucial part of the strategy.

You need to even segment the right customer groups based on various criteria like common pain points, ability to pay, ability to reach those customers etc etc.

There are different well known framework you can use , like Jobs To be Done, Empathy Map etc.

Based on these, you can decide the unique value proposition. Here you should offer some unique benefits to the users to clearly see some differentiations from the customers perspective.

You also need to analyze the  market sizing both in terms of $ value and the no of users in TAM, SAM, SOM to evaluate the sustainability of the business.And it s so critical that ,investors are very interested in the figures.  

Then you can see, different strategic framework like BCG Matrix, SWOT analysis,  5 forces etc to know few strategic decision.

There are various strategic choices you need to make out of various possibilities to reach your goal fro that year.

This are the basic strategic steps must be considered before making a decision where a worth pursuing or not ; or even to convince the sponsors or the investors, its is super important.

Another next important thing is GTM, how do you reach the potential customers . You can make a really great product , but until and unless you can take it to the users, you wont make any impact

Personally , I give equal weightage to it like a product development .

In GTM also unit economic comes in to place, You may need to tray different channels and analyze which can provide greater ROI. Experiment different channels with different CAC vs LTV and choose the right channel finally.

Also with GTM, I would like to forecast the financial revenue forecasting. Ultimately we need to build predictability on your product with respect too the earnings. 

Few important aspect you need to do is to build various financial models to see, in different market situation, how you will be profitable . How long it may take to break even your initial investment.

Many investors shows interest to know Net Present Value or IRR.

These fundamental knowledge are critical before deciding to pursue an idea or not.

Hope this small article helps to build a basic mental structure while initiating your new innovation.