I’ve devoted years of my life, putting together all the materials and resources that have helped me along the way of becoming a digital entrepreneur and head of business development for a tech startup.

I thought it just made sense to document those things along the way so that I could form a more in-depth understanding by writing about it, and you, my reader, could gain insights and expertise, without spending hours and hours of research.

In this post, I’m assembling all the resources you need to get going with a business if you’re ready to leap becoming a digital entrepreneur. I suggest there are four key areas when starting your business, which we’ll group under the acronym of MOVE, standing for:

• Mindset
• Operations
• Velocity (momentum)
• and Execution

Each of those areas needs to be mastered to design, launch, and iterate a successful business. This isn’t a size fits all model, neither the only one possible. But it is a model that can help you get “moving”.

Let’s look at each of them.

Mindset

When starting a business, in particular, a digital business, you should have a 10X mindset. The reason is you might be starting a venture in a competitive space; none knows your brand, you might be missing the budget to grow it steadily.

Thus, you need to think and act smart. You can’t rely on conventional wisdom, or already walked paths. While business best practices will be your baseline, you will need to have a growth mindset, where each action you take needs to be measured and deemed successful if it gives you massive traction.

Never run out of ideas

A common belief is that ideas only come to creative people. In reality, we all have a flow of creativity wired in our minds. We just need to develop the right mindset, and for that reason, the guide below can help you achieve just that:

• Why anyone can be creative
• Getting into the Flow process
• Creativity can be manufactured
  • Acquisition of creativity and interest
    • Curiosity and interest
    • Cultivating flow
    • Habits of strength
  • Mastering your internal traits
  • Apply your creative energy
    • Problem finding
    • Divergent thinking
    • Choosing a special domain
• Funneling ideas
  • Don’t be scared to throw 99% of your ideas
  • Are you passionate about it? Or are you willing to put together the team that might be passionate about it? 
  • Idea validation: Is there a market demand?

If you heard that ideas are overrated in business, that’s correct. That doesn’t mean ideas are not important.

But just that in business you will never know whether an idea will work in the real world, until you don’t test it. That is why it’s critical to have a framework to test ideas quickly; keep those that work and that have the potential to become your next business!

Find your sweet-spot

Starting a successful business is not an easy thing to do, as most startups fail in the first years of operations. For that matter, you need to have the resources to get going the first stage and have things take off as quickly as possible.

However, in many cases, a startup will really take off and become a mature and successful organization in at least 5-10 years from its inception. That requires a huge amount of stamina, passion, and resources to get going.

Therefore, in many cases, to launch a successful business, it is important to balance two dimensions:

• Personal dimension: are you passionate about the business you’re stating? The problem it is solving? Or about managing the team that will solve that problem?
• Financial dimension: is there a market ready to respond to your potential product? If not, do you have enough financial resources to get going until there will be a market-ready for your product?

Those two dimensions are critical to launching a successful company. Passion (either for the business or the team that will manage it) is critical to get going for the long-run and even when things seem not to work out.

The financial dimension is critical, either to enable your business to gain traction (if there is a defined, existing market to start with). Or to be able to get going even when the market is not ready yet. Think of the case of a high tech product, based on new technology. You will need funding to make sure you will bring that product to market effectively.

The third dimension, which is about feasibility is less important compared to the two above.

When you do balance those dimensions, you are on the right path.

In search of your blue ocean

It’s easy to start a business in a crowded space. It doesn’t take to much searching or tinkering. You just need to look at what others are doing and fo for it. That’s the reason why everyone wants to start her own restaurant, even if it will hardly make any money.

And if you need to start a business as a means to give you the financial resources for you and your family that is fine.

However, if you have the option to build the kind of business you want, you might want to search for your blue ocean. A blue ocean is an uncontested space where you can build your business and become the key player.

Find your niche, or better yet your microniche

Another common mistake when starting a business is the complete lack of definition of what kind of business you want to build and how you want to be recognized. In short, call it as you like, positioning, targeting, niche, or whatever.

What matters is to find your perspective. Building a successful business is about telling your side of a story, finding your unique perspective. What is that you do that makes you different, why would people both buy from you in the first place?

How do you pick a microniche?

Let’s start from a simple example. Let’s say you’re opening up a bookstore, looking for opportunities to kick off the store.

Where do you start?

The platform with the most data when it comes to books is definitely Amazon. You start from the Amazon broadest categories to start looking for opportunities:

There was a time when it was possible to stop there. As the web was not such a crowded space for you to start a business. However, nowadays you need to a lower level to look for your microniche.

Thus, saying something like “I’ll start from literature, or historic fiction” isn’t enough. Those are too broad. So where do you start?

Go a level down:

Within Amazon‘s literature and historical fiction, we can identify a further category for us to start with. For this example I took something like “historical fiction” and went a level down:

I selected for instance, “Reinassance” as the key area within the micro-target I’m picking to kick off my business distribution strategy.

Thus the process looks something like that:

Within that microniche you can see how the bestseller has quite some substantial reach:

The interesting thing is that what it might actually seem a very small audience it turns out to be a decent audience for a business which is starting out.

Indeed, by crossing the data from Amazon to the keyword volume for the book’s author “Johanna Lindsey” you can see how she is a micro-celebrity:

Example of how a microniche analysis uncovers the audience around a micro-celebrity and it opens up opportunities to kick off your business distribution (data: SEMRush)

It is interesting to notice how we uncovered a potential audience made of over four thousand people each month, by just doing simple research on Amazon and by crossing that with keyword volume.

Thus, if you were to start a bookstore in that category you might want to make sure to have all the books of that author available, create a content strategy around it.

And for instance, invite the author for an off-line session with her fans. While for instance, also transmitting that live online so that you can reach a wider audience and create the first set of loyal customers for your bookstore!

Pretotype

Another huge, and common mistake many entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs make when starting a business is to focus on technicalities instead of asking the most important question: do people want this?

In short, idea validation is extremely important. You can use several frameworks for that, as the lean canvas. Or you can use a technique called pretotype, which I covered with Alberto Savoia on the interview on the blog. 

Iterate up to market-fit

When you get into the process of quickly validating your ideas, to get passed the most difficult stage; where you need to find that moment when customers finally get what you’re offering them, at the point that you need to barely explain what you’re selling, as they will buy with limited friction.

Businesspeople calls this product-market fit. Once again, the definition is not important. What matters is that you pass that stage to build a valuable business, quickly.

Operations

In a digital business, setting up the operations doesn’t necessarily mean to build up physical facilities. Instead, that is about drafting a business model that will allow you to be competitive in the marketplace.

This process isn’t a one-time thing. Indeed, before your business model would take off, you’ll need to iterate it over and over again.

When will your business model be competitive? Primarily when it has reached:

• Recurring, sustainable income
• Flywheel effects
• And fat margins

In short, the right business model will be able to have a built-in monetization strategy that generates income, based on repeatable processes, that are sustainable in the long run.

Also, your business model will need to leverage on a flywheel effect, where monetization powers up your brand, rather than diluting it. In other words, when you start making money, that monetization needs to reinforce your brand, so that more people will want to deal with your company.

As your brand gains momentum, you can leverage it to enjoy higher and higher margins. When you enjoy fat margins (there isn’t a fixed percentage, but it depends on the industry and competition), that’s when you’ve mastered the operational part.

In general, the more the gap between revenues and costs increases (revenues grow faster than costs), the more you’re on the right path to building a long-term competitive advantage.

Stay lean

Unless you got enormous funding for your business, you want to follow a lean methodology approach. This will help you to stay in business for as long as possible while tuning your business for the market.

Stay focused

While you will be tempted to test many things out, and you do want to test many of them. You still want to keep a focus on 2-3 key objectives that can have a massive impact on your business.

Stay fast and frugal

Speed is critical in business and you need to be very quick, especially when you’re starting things out because in order for them to gain traction it will initially take a lot of push.

This business plan will help you to come up with a business model to test in the marketplace:

Velocity and Momentum

At this stage, before you go to the execution stage, it is crucial you know what distribution channels you can tap into. For that matter, you need to prioritize on the acquisition or growth channel that might work best, based on the strategy you picked.

Instead of trying to tap into all the possible distribution channels, mastering one, in the short run is probably the most effective strategy in many cases.

For that matter, you need to understand whether you might want to leverage business development, growth marketing, traditional sales, and marketing or else.

Switch on the engines of growth

Once all the conditions above are met, you need to push on growth. Eric Ries points out that you have, usually, three engines of growth you can leverage on.

Growth framework

It’s very important that at this stage, you have a growth framework in place to pass the several stages of growth you need to build a sustainable company.

Execution

When you start executing, that is when you will be able to gather critical feedback to understand whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. This is the essential part of the MOVE model.

In this phase, you need to gather feedback on several areas:

• Is the business gaining momentum? Remember, momentum will be judged on unconventional, two-fold, or 10X growth basis
• Does the market like my business model? You can decide that by growth or profitability or both
• How effective is my strategy? Is the real world validating it or do I need to go back and tweak my business model?
• What distribution channel is working so far? You need to double down on what’s working
• Am I spending too much time theorizing? If so, go back to the execution phase to gather more feedback from the marketplace!

Key takeaways

When you start moving, you also need to make sure you’re going in the right direction. That is why, in the execution phase, you need to reconsider whether what you’re doing is helping you achieve the 10X growth you were looking for at the beginning of the MOVE model.

Or whether your business model generates growing margins. Or yet, whether you need to leverage network effects to enhance growth. Moving back and forth in the MOVE model might help you gain traction to generate a long-term competitive advantage!

Tools, frameworks and additional resources

It is always important to highlight that tools and frameworks are things that need to help us in moving toward our goal. What tool and framework we might want to use is also based on the kind of business we want to build.

The power of the brand and your brand identity