The four stages you cannot skip

The sentence we hear most often in a first conversation is: "The product is basically done, what we need now is a marketing budget." Sometimes that is true. More often it means something else: we do not yet know who actually needs this, and we are hoping money will let us skip finding out.

Entering the US from Taiwan, resources are always finite — finite cash, finite months, a finite number of meetings you can personally attend. So sequence is not a matter of style. It is a matter of allocation. Get the order wrong and you will pay the most expensive possible price to learn something that was cheap to learn.

The four stages

Between zero and scalable there are four stages. They are ordered, and they cannot be skipped.

• 01Get fast. Pick one primary metric and one uncomfortable target, then raise your tempo. The point of this stage is not to be right — it is to be in motion, because a stationary team learns nothing.
• 02Get smart. Use that motion to find out who the real customer is and what the real problem is. Note that the output of this stage is not features. It is understanding.
• 03Get efficient. Iterate on what you learned until 5, then 10, then 100, then 1,000 people love the product. This stage permits — and usually requires — things that do not scale.
• 04Build distribution. Only once people genuinely cannot do without the product do you go looking for a repeatable acquisition channel.

What skipping costs

Skipping a stage rarely explodes immediately, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. It quietly amplifies the problem, and by the time you see it the cost of correction has multiplied.

• 01Scaling spend while retention is still poor is pouring more water into a leaking bucket. You do not get growth. You get a larger invoice and a set of numbers that look acceptable and cannot hold.
• 02Piling on features before you understand the customer accumulates decisions that are hard to reverse. The more you build, the more expensive it becomes to turn around, and the harder it gets for the team to admit it should.
• 03Raising money does not mean you completed the four stages. Capital extends the time you can be wrong. It does not backfill a stage you skipped.

Resources do not fix a sequencing problem. They only let you travel the wrong road faster, and at greater expense.

The cross-border version

When these four stages cross the Pacific, a specific trap appears. Taiwanese teams have often already completed stages two and three at home, and so assume that entering the US can begin at stage four.

But the US is a new market, which means your stage counter resets. The customer profile, the severity of the pain, the price band, the procurement process — all of it has to be validated again. This is not a demand that you rebuild the product. It is a demand that you admit something: to an American buyer, you are a new company.

In practice that usually means twenty US customer interviews before any budget is spent, and serving the first ten customers by hand before building a channel. It sounds slow. It is far faster than the wrong order.

How to tell which stage you are in

Do not ask the team how it feels. Ask these, and require answers someone else could check:

• 01Can you name the five to ten people who love this product most? If you cannot produce names, you are still in stage two.
• 02Do you know how they solved this problem before you existed? If the answer is that they did not, the problem is usually not painful enough.
• 03If the product disappeared tomorrow, would they be upset, or would they simply switch? The first is evidence of stage three. The second is not.
• 04Is your current growth coming from an action you can repeat, or from a one-off moment of attention? Only the former is stage four.

You do not need an advisor to ask those four questions. And if the answers put you back in stage two, that is good news — you have just saved an entire round of ad spend.