Fail Fast or Win Big: The Start-Up Plan for Starting Now - Hardcover

Schroeder, Bernhard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814434789 ISBN 13: 9780814434789

Publisher: AMACOM, 2015

Synopsis

Entrepreneurs have long been taught that to be successful,they need to spend months perfecting a business plan andfinding investors before they can finally launch their business. But with the marketplace changing at lightning speed, this notion is not only outdated - it’s costly.

There’s no point to building a business in a bubble. Today’s entrepreneurs must embrace the idea of “failing fast.” They need to connect with real customers and determine quickly whether their idea is worth pursuing, needs new direction, or should be abandoned altogether. Fail Fast or Win Big shows entrepreneurs how to:

• Create a rapid prototype of their product or service
• Develop a business model instead of a business plan
• Test it repeatedly with customers so they can spot failure early
• Continue to refine the model based on customer interactions
• Leverage their network and resources in order torun lean

The longer it takes to launch a company, the more changes there will have been in the market place. Featuring real-life examples of entrepreneurs who set out to fail fast and ended up winning big, this ground breaking guide reveals how the right kind of risk can really pay off.

About this title

About the Author

BERNHARD SCHROEDER is a director at the prestigious Lavin Entrepreneurship Center at San Diego State University. Previously a senior partner at CKS Partners, the world's largest integrated marketing communications agency, he has served as a marketing and brand expert for successful start-ups such as Amazon and Yahoo as well as Fortune 100 firms such as Apple, Nike, Kellogg's, GM, and American Express.

From the Back Cover

If you went to business school, you may have learned that you’ll never succeed without a sound business plan. And while it’s true that knowing your market and having a solid strategy for reaching it are valuable qualities, you’re wasting time.

By the time you’ve studied every case history, consulted every expert, analyzed all the figures, and designed the “perfect solution for today’s market,” it’s already tomorrow. Wouldn’t you rather get out there and start selling your product or service now?

Fail Fast or Win Big shows you how to forgo a traditional business plan by building a viable business model, a way to find, test, and sell to your market simultaneously, practically from Day 1, then leverage your customers’ experiences immediately toward improving your product. This could mean scrapping your product completely—so be it! If you’re going to fail, fail fast and move on to your big win.

Bernhard Schroeder has been there for the tumultuous births of some powerhouse companies that literally started in someone’s garage or an old warehouse. Regardless of industry, what set those companies apart from potential competitors is that they didn’t wait around for approval from a board, a think tank, or an investor—they put together a product or a service (sometimes only barely viable) and threw it into the market. From there, customer feedback told them exactly what to do.

Fail Fast or Win Big lays out do-it-now tactics and gives quick and powerful examples of successful companies who shunned labor-intensive formal plans in favor of real-world prototyping and research. In a few cases, these enterprises failed spectacularly—then dusted off and jumped right back in. Never pausing to let opportunity fly past them, they took risks, reaped rewards, and won big. Very, very big.

From the Inside Flap

As an entrepreneur, you are not in the business of writing business plans. You need to move faster. Market conditions evolve so rapidly today that by the time you could perfect a business plan, it would likely be obsolete and your competitors would have already beaten you to market. It makes more sense to remain lean, flexible, and willing to change with the marketplace. You need a new way of thinking and doing.

The LeanModel Framework™ is your way forward. This business framework strategy lets you forego many of the most time-consuming and least productive elements of business planning in favor of getting a working prototype of your service or product to market in 90 days or sooner. Doing so will supply you much more quickly with the information most crucial to your business trajectory: initial customer feedback, from which you make the decision to tinker or rethink your approach, scale up, or even abandon ship.

A LeanModel strategy will also endear you to today’s investors. Instead of selling them on a perfect business plan, you’re much better off selling them on an actual product or service—even a rough prototype—that you know you can test in the marketplace. And if nobody’s buying, then you’ve failed fast and can move on to your next win.

Fail Fast or Win Big, based on the author’s more than 20 years spent helping small companies become market leaders, helps you get right down to it with strategies for:

• Leveraging your own network for expert advice and potential early customers

• Anticipating how and when markets for your product will form, intersect, and morph into new opportunities

• Incorporating customer truth at your earliest stages of development

• Rapidly developing and deploying prototypes into test markets

• Leveraging lessons learned and even abject failures into your next launch—immediately

• Finding funding from new and unconventional sources

You need to believe that if you can’t really identify and create a solid business model, utilize lean resources, rapidly create a prototype, and seek customer truth repeatedly, the odds of creating a successful company just went down.

In other words, quit planning—and start doing.

Bernhard Schroeder is the Director of Programs at the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center at San Diego State University, one of Forbes’ Top 20 Schools for Entrepreneurship. Previously, he was a Senior Partner in the world’s largest integrated marketing communications agency, CKS Partners. He has been a marketing and brand expert for Fortune 100 companies such as Apple, Nike, GM, Amex, Mercedes Benz, Kellogg’s, as well as startup companies like Yahoo!, Corbis, ESPN, and Amazon, where he led the entire marketing effort from 1995 to 1997.

Visit his website at www.bernieschroeder.com

Edition details

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814434789
• ISBN 13: 9780814434789
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208