About The Innovator Journey

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You've thought of the idea, normally by experiencing pain of an existing process or experiencing a problem with an existing product. At this stage, utilise the lean canvas model, and start documenting plans.

Understand your skill set, and other people in your team. If you're missing skills to create the product or service, now is the time to recruit. Most commonly founders attract team members by giving away shares/equity in the business or paying contractors based on milestones. 

It's now time to create an (MVPS) minimal viable product/service. Understand your target market and ask potential customers if they feel the same way about the problem you have experienced, and how much they would pay for your new product/service. Keep doing this and don't stop doing this in the future. 

It's now time to sell your MVPS to your target market. Record monthly sales and focus on growing sales month after month. While making your MVPS a better product or service. This should increase demand and assist increasing monthly sales. 

This is where you choose to put a portion of the sales back into investing in the product/service, as well as recruiting staff and putting in place systems & processes. 

Or/As Well

External capital invested is where you've reached a position in the business that you don't have the capital needed to grow your business as much and as fast as you want. 

Then seeking external capital from investors is an option to explore.

Below are the rounds of investment you may choose to pursue: Investment/Valuation

Pre-Seed - $200,000/$2 million valuation

Seed - $500,000/$10 million valuation

Series A - $3m/$25 million valuation

Series B - $10m/$50 million valuation

Series C - $25m/$100 million valuation

It's now time to recruit the best of the best, as staff and as contractors/consultants. 

Implement, test and adapt business strategy, sales & marketing strategy, financial controls, assigned investment, executive dashboard & hierarchy procedures.

Deliberate implementation into what has been researched as the best new market to enter. This could be assessed uniquely to suit your business capability. Enter slowly, and once measures indicate a strong demand, increase expansion activity rapidly to gain market share. 

Follow the same strategy as Step 7, however this time you may feel comfortable with your knowledge, and experience to scale to multiple new markets at the same time. 

You've reached the goal of $20 million in annual revenue. Which is on average $1.7 million monthly revenue. 

It's now time to think about if you want to continue in the business, or would prefer to sell and pursue other options.

At this stage, it may feel important to stay within the business, or because you enjoy it. You may also be thinking about future generations, and handing the business over to your next of kin or chosen suiter. 

Alternatively, you've decided to sell. You've reached a position in the business that you don't have the desire to continue, or you're more attracted to spending your time on other ventures. At this stage, you will want to sell or reduce the amount of shares you own and commitment you need to make.