Think of strategy as a cyclic loop. You need a vision and some goals to have some kind of starting point, and then you need to do some research and analysis to figure out whether they are sensible or not, and then you need to revise them based on what you've learnt and back again until you're happy you're in the right place. And then a little while later you have to repeat the cycle again, just to make sure you're still on the right track, and so on periodically.
So this post is about the next step... Market Research & Analysis.
Why?
Some people make the business of research and analysis very complicated, and you can go into as much detail as you like, but for start-ups at stage 1, the important thing is to understand what’s happening around you for two reasons
- You don’t waste your time and money doing something that either won’t work, or has already been done to death by lots of other companies with more resources
- You are able to show possible investors:
- how your offering differentiates, and
- that it has opportunities to succeed financially or otherwise in whichever market you are planning to enter
