MBA2563 Why Starting Small is the Smartest Move You’ll Ever Make

0:05The gambling site FanDuel just sold for$559 million. Sounds like a success story right? Wrong. The founders and employees walked away from the sale with nothing. Yep, a big donut. How? Well, long story short, they raised$416 million at a$1.3 billion valuation. All because they wanted to grow as fast as possible. This is a cautionary tale because they ended up selling and getting nothing for it. All the time and energy wasted. You don't want that to be you. And that's why today's topic is why starting small is the smartest move you'll ever make. Too many entrepreneurs think they have to go big or go home.

0:48But the truth is, starting small gives you the flexibility, the focus, and the foundation to help build you something that will last. Let me show you why this approach is not just smart, but essential for the survival of your business. Did you know that 70 % of startups fail because they scale too quickly? That's according to CB Insights. premature scaling is one of the top reasons why businesses fold. Starting small isn't just safe, it's smart. And it's how you can set yourself up for long-term success. I always borrow this line from Jason Fried that says, I don't want to create a startup, I want to create a stay-up.

1:25So today I'm going to show you how small beginnings can lead to big wins. And I'm living proof. I started a software company called Webinar Ninja with my partner, Nicole. We started this company, self-funded, no outside equity or funding, and we're able to build it slowly, right? Slow growth. And 10 years later, we got acquired by ProProfs for money that changed our life. So this is something that can happen and happens all the time, but you don't hear it because it's not big headlines everywhere in the news because at the end of the day, no one thinks it's sexy to do it slowly. But slow growth allows you to minimize your risk and have a greater chance of success in the long term.

2:06And that's where we're going to start today's lesson. The first point I want to make is starting small lowers your risk. When you start small, you minimize your financial and operational risks. You don't have to invest heavily in product or service or a big office or anything like that until there's real demand for your product, right? When I started any of my businesses for the last two decades, I really liked to start Start small. See the money come in first. See the customers basically break down my door, my proverbial door for the product. Then I know, okay, I have something in my hands. Let's scale this.

2:41Let's build this out so that we can provide this product to the customer. This is why launching a minimal viable product is so essential. So that's a good action step to take when it comes to lowering your risk. Launching something small, minimal viable, meaning something that is solving the problem for the customer in a minimal way that is allowing them to feel like this has value and they're willing to pay for it. You're using this as a test to test your market, to refine your offering, and to understand that, hey, I don't wanna put so much money up front on something that's not proven. Once it's proven and it's making you money and it's actually solving a problem, then you can start improving and scaling and reinvesting into that product.

3:25But we wanna make sure we have a winner on our hands. The second thing I wanna stress after the MVP is to focus, to learn, and to iterate fast. Starting small allows you to focus on your customers. You're listening constantly to what they need, what their problems are, what they're complaining about, right? You make improvements quickly to whatever you're creating, right? And you're just more flexible, more agile, which means you can adapt faster and change to the feedback that you hear, right? In the beginning, you're just basically begging for your customer to tell you everything they can about their problems, about their issues, about your product, how you can improve it.

4:02Because the faster you get ready, the faster you implement that feedback, the quicker you're going to start seeing some result. The faster you're going to get to that point where it's like, okay, I got product market fit. People are happy with what I got. They're willing to pay for it. Let me do this at a higher scale. Over the last couple of decades of me doing this thing called business, I've seen too many businesses, too many entrepreneurs sink so much time and money in an idea that's not proven. They haven't actually talked to customers. They haven't had anybody try their thing before. They spend two, three years working on an app or a software, and then they launch it, you know, 100 ,000, 200 ,000, sometimes millions of dollars in debt or in investor money.

4:42And they have nothing because they haven't seen the rubber hit the road. They haven't seen customers actually interact with this product and tell you, yep, I love it, or I hate it, or this is what I would change, or I'm willing to pay this much or that much. That's really the reality that you need to face, and you need to face it as soon as possible, like within days of you creating the MVP quickly. So as an action step, you want to identify the core problem your product, your business solves, right? Once you understand that, you can understand, is your product actually solving it? What's the core problem that you are solving or trying to solve with your product?

5:21And then you can figure out from customer feedback, is it actually doing that? Then you can gather the feedback, make improvements, and then you can start expanding based on the reaction people have to your new iteration of your product. Okay, great. Now people like this thing. They're willing to pay for it. They're happy. They're staying on. They're keeping it for a while. They're using it over and over. I see in my dashboard how many people have signed into the app today, whatever it is. The point is that you have data to prove. you have a winner on your hands. Number three, build trust and credibility over time.

5:53The reason why starting small lets you really have a sustainable business is that you have enough time to build credibility and trust with your audience. Starting small allows you to focus on delivering value to your customers. And when you do this and you do this consistently, your reputation starts growing organically. People start seeing you as a winner, as a company they can trust is a company that's kind of been around for a while, credible, right? I'm always wary of all these products or services or apps or tools that run your business, you know, like, hey, this is a great tool you can use.

6:27I'm always wary if I haven't heard about them for a while, you know, if they haven't been around for a while. I like to try it in true and tested products because I know that they have some reputation, right? It's not maybe perfect, but that product at least been around and they've seen a lot and they're committed. And I'm sure if you've heard a million motivational speeches or videos that say, you know, Apple started out of a garage and Amazon started with, you know, makeshift desks, you know, and just started with a bookstore. And the reason why they say that is that they started small. They first made sure they had something on their hands before they started to grow.

7:01They started with a product, with a service. For example, Amazon started with just selling books. And once they built their reputation of being reliable and the books got delivered on time and people felt like if they needed to return something, it was safe. They built credibility in the e-commerce world. Then they expanded because now they have a reputation to lean on and people are going to trust them for that new product line. So as an action step, treat your early customers like gold. Deliver exceptional service, exceptional experience so that you can get great reviews, great testimonials, great case studies.

7:37These people become your biggest advocates. They become our biggest cheerleaders and they become your biggest marketers through word of mouth. Number four, by starting small, it protects your energy and your resources. Scaling too quickly can drain your time, your energy, your focus. It's really hard to run a business and to do it in And overdrive is almost impossible, right? Starting small increases your likelihood of success by ensuring you stay focused on what matters most without spreading yourself too thin. And when I say what matters most, it's really your product. It's what you actually offer the world.

8:16That's really what matters most, right? And then I would say as a secondary thing to focus on is selling and marketing that product. Those are the two things that are gonna allow you to be successful. Many businesses fail because they try to do too much at once, right? By starting small, it keeps you laser focused on what's working and you just double down on that so you don't burn out. So as an action step, I want you to prioritize the tasks and the goals that you have that directly impact your product or service's success. So that might be marketing or sales of that product or service. That could be improving the product by getting better engineers.

8:49That could be better advertising of your product or service or a better website that actually shows the value. Let go of distractions that don't move the needle. Stop trying to feel like you have to have something that you don't need to have, like a foosball table, right? Like snacks at your, you know, a fancy office. You can have that later if you'd like. Once you have so much money, you don't know what to do with it, and you want to treat your team with that, that's great. But in the beginning, you don't have anything yet. You need to make sure you have traction because the product is what fuels everything.

9:26I say this to my team all the time. I just had a team meeting with them and I say to them, if our product is not the best, if we don't continue to improve, we all don't get paid, right? We all don't benefit, right? This is what we need to focus on. When this is great, we all get to eat and be happy and be merry, right? We all get to enjoy the fruits of that product, but we can't just rest on our laurels. We got to continue to improve it. Number five, lay a strong foundation for scaling later. Starting small gives you the time to refine your processes, build systems, create a solid foundation to build standing operating procedures or SOPs.

10:05This makes scaling smoother and less risky when the time comes, right? You have the foundation, right? It's easy for you to now do it because you've prepared for it. So, for example, when I was building Webinar Ninja, our software company, and we're getting really serious about it, we really wanted to make sure our systems were rock solid. So we documented everything an engineer should be doing when they're committing code, including commenting on the code, unit testing, the procedure of deploying that code. Everything was documented so that we follow a script. We follow a system that ensures consistency and quality.

10:41This allows us to scale easily because when a new engineer comes up on board, they can just read this documentation and know exactly what to do and not make any mistakes. because those mistakes are costly for a software company. So as an action step, focus on creating repeatable processes. A document, like a Google Doc, this becomes your system. Even when you're small, right? Document what works and what you're doing every day so that you can easily hand it off to somebody else when they hire you. One of the best things to do, one of the easiest things to do is when you have your first hire, that should be their first task.

11:18It's to document what they do every day, what they do in terms of their work, how they do their tasks, how they complete them, how they know they've completed them properly, right? What's the checks and balances? And to document that in a handbook. And then we have a handbook here at the$100 MBA for our team. And that way, it's easy to get somebody to join our team and just jump in and start going. Within weeks, they are rock and rolling like they've been here for years. So to wrap this up, starting small isn't a limitation. I know I've done this over and over. It's actually a strategy. It lowers your risk.

11:51It helps you learn faster. It builds trust with your customers, allows you to protect your energy and allows you to really focus. It sets the foundation for long-term success, right? If you're a big dreamer, like I am, right? Remember, every big success starts small, right? If you start small and start scaling at the speed that your product allows it to, right? When I say the speed the product allows it to, if your product is not where it needs to be, meaning it's not good enough to be a big multi-million dollar or multi-billion dollar company, then you need to just listen to the product, listen to your customers, make sure the product is ready for that, right?

12:30It's good enough for that. And a lot of this has to do with keeping your eyes on the numbers, by the way. So make sure that you're spending less than you're making. And that's a good indicator where you're at in terms of your product. Start where you are with what you have and let your business grow naturally, right? I'm not saying to just slow walk it. Work as hard as you can, right? Work as smart as you can. But at the same time, don't get ahead of yourself and get yourself into trouble like FanDuel did. Thanks for tuning into the$100 MBA show. I'm Omar Zinom. And if you love this podcast, make sure you hit subscribe, whether you're watching it on YouTube or you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or any podcast player to get our next episodes automatically.

13:10It's absolutely free. and it's the best way to support the show so we can continue to deliver practical business lessons to you. Thanks again, and I'll see you in the next episode.