If you want to unlock unprecedented growth in your business—which will lead to exceptional value creation—consider taking the leap and expanding into new markets, verticals, and offerings. 

In this solocast, Jim Barnish dives deep into strategies to ensure that your products or services cater to the needs and preferences of your new customers. 

Some of what Jim gets into: 

• Before Jumping Into A New Market, Immerse Yourself In It: You can’t just assume you and your team knows your audience, that your pricing strategy will be effective, and you’ll be able to handle any risks that pop up. If you don’t conduct extensive market research, you’ll surely miss out on valuable insights that could make or break your business. 
• Engage Early Adopters In A Pilot Program: Validating a business concept through a pilot isn’t just about testing your new product. It's also about engaging with real customers who can provide actionable insights. Bonus points if you target early adopters who are much more likely to provide constructive criticism and be invested in your new offering’s success.  

About The Dirt Podcast 

The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

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About Our Company

Orchid Black is a new kind of growth services firm. We partner with tech-forward companies to build smarter, better, game-changing businesses. 

Website: https://www.orchid.black 

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Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Dirt Podcast. I'm your host, Jim Varnish, my friends call me JB, and today we are diving deep into the heart of business growth and value creation with a particular focus on a topic that many growth stage companies and many mature companies often get intimidated by. This topic is expansion. Expansion to new markets, expansion to new verticals, expansion to new offerings, you name it.

But if you're ready for some genuine, actionable insights into this topic around expansion, then you are in the right place. In the ever competitive world of tech companies, expansion, whether it be new markets or new products or new services or new verticals, or whatever that expansion might mean to you, that is the beacon that often guides businesses to new growth-oriented horizons. It's about venturing into uncharted territories

diversifying your customer base, and tapping into untapped markets. So why should you lean in? Well, because this could be the key to unlocking unprecedented growth in your business, which leads to unprecedented value creation. See where I'm going here? All right, well, in today's podcast, we're gonna help you master the art of expansion by touching on three key themes that are relevant, whether you are exploring new markets or new offerings.

First, you need to go deep into market research. So, what does this mean? You have to go deep and understand the respective market or markets, inherently the nuances of the marketplace that you're going to enter next. You have to just truly get in touch with what that means. And so we'll dig into what go deep in market research means in a minute. Then you need to validate through a pilot or MVP program. MVP means...

minimum viable product, or minimum viable, minimum viable product. Wow. To get an understanding of the customer needs, right? And then you need to launch efficiently and effectively to amplify that growth. So three steps, three stages, let's go deep into each one. So first, what does go deep into market research means? This means expanding your addressable market requires an understanding of where you're going.

Makes sense? Of course. It's not just about entering a new market, it's about immersing yourself in this new market and understanding the nuances of potential customers. Before you dive into any new market, you need to really get at what it's all about. So maybe think of it like planning a road trip. You wouldn't just jump in the car without knowing at least somewhat where you're going, right? Well, here are some things that you need to look into as part of going deep into market research.

Market analysis is a big one, which means what do people want? So imagine you're planning the same road trip with your friends, and you'd probably pick a location that most people want to go to, right, where there's actually people around, or at least people have talked about loving it. Of course you would. Like similarly, you need to find out what potential customers are looking for so that you can offer it to them. All right, next is competitor analysis. What are others doing in this market? It's like checking out

TikTok or TripAdvisor to see what fun stops you can make during your trip. You wanna see what other businesses are doing well and where they're dropping the ball so that you can do better. All right, next is skill gap analysis, meaning what are you missing as an organization to serve that market? Think of this as realizing you need a tent for your road trip when you're all the way in, but you just don't have one. And this helps you to identify what tools, skills,

or people you're missing, whether a tent or something else, to make your venture a success before you realize you don't have it. Lastly is financial modeling and analysis, meaning how much will it cost, how much revenue can I drive? Ultimately, what is the value of what I can get from this market? So this is like taking out a map and choosing the most direct path to your location. You need to know the most direct path in order to ensure you are getting the most value

for your investment into this new market rather than wasting it on gas, rolling in circles on your road trip. I know I've been there. Anyways, skipping any of these steps is like forgetting to pack food for the road trip. Sure you might survive, but it ain't gonna be pretty. All right, so one strong case study I think of around doing it right with this market expansion and the research part in particular is Dropbox.

Dropbox initially focused on individual users, but later expanded its services to cater to businesses with Dropbox Business. When they first flashed onto the tech scene, the platform offered this seamless, user-friendly solution for cloud storage, which made the days of emailing files to oneself or carrying around a USB drive just seem archaic. It was a huge hit among students, like myself, freelancers, and anyone else who needed to store and access

files on the go. But while Dropbox was busy becoming a household name, it was also out eyeing another more lucrative market, which was businesses. So this decision to launch Dropbox Business demonstrated the company's recognition that the same point it saw for individual users were the same and magnified, in fact, tenfold in the business setting where collaboration and data security are even more paramount.

But breaking into the enterprise market isn't just as simple as slapping an enterprise or business label on your existing service. It requires a deep understanding of how the enterprise operates. Or in the case of Dropbox, how enterprise document storage and sharing differs from personal use for document sharing and storage. For example, enterprises are for the most part much more concerned with access rights than, let's say, your aunt Sally and uncle Tom, who just wanted to share their

family vacation pictures to Disney World where cousin Alex got stuck on Space Mountain. That's a story for another time. So remember, it's not just about shifting focus, it's about gaining deep insights through market research, competitive analysis, skill gap analysis, and financial modeling, ultimately engaging with stakeholders. During this process, you have to be sure to identify the market size, the growth rate, barriers to entry, all of these things

to get into the new market. This immersion and understanding of the market informs your strategy and sets you up to not just be another player, but a force in the market. All right, next, number two, validate through pilot or some sort of MVP program. So to get a better understanding of customer needs, you have to do this. Validating a business concept through something like a pilot is not just about testing.

the product, it's also about engaging with real customers who can provide actionable insights. By targeting a small, specific audience, often acquired through close relationships or referrals, a company can obtain high-quality feedback that is both detailed and relevant. These early adopters are much more likely to be invested in the product's success and provide constructive criticism that can be invaluable for product refinement as well.

And the close relationship with these initial customers creates this amazing feedback loop that is super authentic and reliable, much more so than traditional, secondary market research methods, right? Which enables the company to make nuanced adjustments that resonate with actual user needs. A huge, a super, let me start over. A super notable example in the B2B space is Cisco systems.

which was a giant and still is a giant in the networking hardware sector. But they decided to expand into cybersecurity solutions. And before fully launching, Cisco ran this pilot program which offered its new cybersecurity solutions to existing clients who were already invested in Cisco and using their networking hardware. The pilot program helped Cisco to understand the specific security needs and challenges that business faced while allowing them to refine their

cybersecurity offerings before they went to market at scale. And this demonstrated a power of a well-executed pilot with Cisco in guiding their successful product expansion. Okay, so final theme, third theme, launch efficiently and effectively. Sounds ambiguous, it's really not when you boil it down into key steps. So to start, you really need to think about leveraging partnerships that make sense in this new market segment as you get ready to really

build something from a launch perspective. A one size fits all approach is a recipe for stagnation. So let's just think about Spotify, who made their initial mark by disrupting your daily music streaming. RIP Pandora, am I right? He had a good run. Anyways, they recognized the potential to expand into podcasts and adapted their core offering. But it wasn't just about adding

a new feature or features. It was about tailoring their platform to provide podcasters with analytics, uh, monetization options and more. And they, they doubled down on this with a purposeful channel strategy. Spotify's partnerships with celebrities like Joe Rogan. I'm sure we've, you know, we've all heard that name attached to Spotify. Other artists or tech platforms have positioned Spotify as a leader in podcasts listening, not just another platform.

that is commoditized in the space. So once you've identified these partnerships, you should really shift your focus towards a two-prong product launch, a soft launch and then a hard launch. Okay, so a soft launch serves as a preliminary, low-key introduction of the product or service to a limited audience. This phase is crucial for gathering initial feedback, identifying potential pitfalls and making necessary adjustments.

It allows the company to test the waters, if you will, without the risk of a full-scale failure. Offering or, yeah, really offering an opportunity to fine-tune marketing strategies, fine-tune pricing models, and even fine-tune the product itself. Once the Kinks have been ironed out, a hard launch follows. This is a full-scale public introduction complete with marketing blitzes and wide distribution and

This hard launch aims to capitalize on the momentum built during the soft launch, but with the added confidence that comes from refined strategies and a product that has been vetted by real world use. Together, the soft and hard launches provide a balanced two-phase approach that maximizes the likelihood of a successful new market expansion for efficiency and effectiveness. See where I'm going here? Whether this be a new market or in the case of Spotify,

a new offering. And remember, partnerships are key as part of this, just like we saw with Spotify. But data alone isn't the only key. It's the ability to act on that data, to pivot when needed, and to constantly refine strategies based on real-time insights. And so for a market expansion, the landscape is just ever evolving, right? Hence the need for so many pivots, and focusing on your strategy around being efficient and effective.

Make sure that you're moving in the right direction as fast as you can with a full awareness of everything around you in the market. So as we wrap up our deep dive into mastering market expansion, let's revisit the core insights we've unearthed. Number one, we learned to go deep into market research just like Dropbox did when expanding to the enterprise. Number two, we examined how Cisco was able to validate through a pilot leading to validation of market gaps.

And number three, we saw how Spotify launched efficiently and effectively by leveraging partnerships, a hard launch and a soft launch to become a leader in the podcast market. All right, well, if today's discussion resonated with you, please get some brownie points with a friend, a colleague, whoever you want, your next door neighbor, someone you just met, anyone that needs to expand or has talked about expanding into new markets or new offerings. And if you haven't already, hit that subscribe button.

for more genuine in-depth discussions around growth and value creation. For a deeper dive into market expansion particularly, or any other growth strategies, check out our sponsor who makes this podcast possible, Orchid Black at orchid.black. They make it real easy for you. Until next time, remember, growth is uncomfortable. It is far from comfortable. It's raw, it's real, it's dirty, but guess what? That's where the magic happens. JB out.