More and more people are seeing the benefits of breaking out on their own. But starting and growing a business is a huge commitment. That’s why we’ve designed this guide to help you come up with new ideas for getting new clients. Not all will be right for you, so we suggest you identify those you see the most opportunity in and test them on a small scale first. Table of Contents: 1. Methods that use what you’ve already got 2. Methods that take a few hours a week 3. Methods for long-term investment

If your brand positioning is off, it won’t matter what inbound channel [paid, content, etc.] you use to get in front of your customer. The problem will be that the traffic you generate from the channel won’t convert or won’t pay what you want because you’re not positioned properly to demand those things.

For so many startups and even larger tech incumbents, the point at which they hit the shoulder in the S-curve is a mystery, and the author suspects the failure to see it occurs much earlier. The good thing is that identifying the enemy sooner allows you to address it. We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have achieved some semblance of it, most should spend much more time on the problem of product-market unfit. In strategic planning, the question in building a forecast is to flush out what the author calls the invisible asymptote: a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path. It's an important concept to understand for many people in a company, whether a CEO, a product person, or a planner in finance.