There are many things needed to start and scale a business, the ones I bang on about all the time are cash and commitment.
There is however another.
Trial.
Without trial, there is no business.
Whether you are starting a business in a well understood and competitively supplied market, or a completely new product in a new field, the challenge is the same.
You must generate trial.
The strategies necessary are entirely different for every business, as the challenges are entirely different. However, the common feature is that you must make the value proposition attractive enough to bust the power of the status quo, and often the barriers to exit for the current customers of incumbent competitors, before you will generate trial.
Then, and only then, if the product performs, and the barriers to adoption post trial are breached in sufficient numbers, you have a chance at survival.
It seems pretty obvious, but we do not usually think about trial as the single and first essential barrier to success. Rather, we tend to think about it as just the first step in a process, not giving trial the weight it deserves.
