🪜 Stair Step Your Way To A Profitable Business, A Framework For Growth 🖼️

I had built and failed to build a business in the past but after I discovered the stair step framework to bootstrapping a business is when things started to click. This framework was written for the context of building a SaaS company but it is my belief that it can be used to scale any business model.

Step One

Find one predictable marketing channel, What I like here is to use build on top of somebody else’s platform. Some of examples of this are

• WP Plugin

• Shopfiy add-on

• Google add-on

• Airbnb add-on

• Fiver if your offering a service

• Airbnb experiences if your offering a pub crawl

• Teachers Pay Teachers

• Amazon or Walmart Seller

What I don’t like for a step one business is learning SEO, unless you are an SEO expect already, or trying to use paid ads. Both SEO & paid search can be extremely difficult to grasp when your just starting out.

Your Step One product is going to be good for your first business adventure something that your going to use to learn the ropes before you jump from the top rope. This gives you the biggest chance of success while minimizing the the possible obstacles. The goal here is KISS, keep it stupid simple.

Starting this way you will have the ability to understand a single traffic source and will be able to understand how to generate customers instead of everything else that comes with running a business online.

Step Two

Expand on the offerings, once you have a single add-on figured out you will probably start to realize that a single add-on or service offering will never replace your full-time income. Step Two is where you expand your offering on the same marketplace or expand your current offering onto new marketplaces. The biggest mistake you can make during Step Two is taking on to big of a challenge here.

I want to make sure that we understand the goal here with Step Two is to own your time. Finding a way to repeat step one over and over till you no longer need a day job or any outside work to make ends meet.

I can’t emphasis enough that now is not the time to learn SEO or paid ads yet, unless your an expect, but during this phase your goal is to continue to depend on the free traffic the marketplaces are providing.

Step Three

Now that you have replaced your income using Step One & Two. You have a few options moving forward. You can continue to iterate on whats gotten you this far and repeat building add-ons or services on marketplaces. Or you can look to scale out a offering on your own platform.

You can build out your own platform here or you can look for a platform that needs help with conversations, or LTV for sale. See you own your own time now and your able to experiment, learn, & grow.

Step Three isn’t about making a moonshot like you read about in the news, its about a using what you have already learned to expand on your time freedom you have already built.