Entrepreneurship newsletter

Remember the bean experiment in school?

We were all taught to put beans on cotton in a jar:

• The first jar is wet cotton in a dark cabinet.
• The second jar is dry cotton in sunlight.
• The third jar is a wet cotton in sunlight... but with a screwed-on lid.
• The fourth and last jar is wet cotton in sunlight and no lid (the control).

The whole point of the experiment is to find out what conditions are needed for germination.

And more importantly, it teaches us that fulfilling the other conditions for germination isn't enough if just 1 of the necessary conditions isn't met.

Applying it to your business

It's the same thing with your business.

For your business to germinate and grow, all the stars have to align.

No, having 9 out of 10 stars align isn't enough -- all 10 have to be aligned properly for the magic to happens.

The corollary of that is that it doesn't matter how much you align and re-align the first 9 stars.

If they're already aligned, re-aligning them over and over again won't get you the result you want -- you'd be beating a dead horse.

The bottleneck a.k.a. limiting factor of growth is that 10th star, and that's exactly where you should focus your efforts.

Identifying the bottleneck

In a software business like Zylvie, the bottleneck can often be boiled down to 2 things: product or marketing.

Sometimes it's the product that's lacking, sometimes it's the marketing that's lacking.

And even when both are lacking, one is often more lacking than the other.

This concept probably translates over to any other kind of online business too.

Maybe your marketing needs work, but maybe your offer/product needs work.

Only you can honestly audit your own business and tell yourself where you've been slacking off on.

What do you dread? What do you usually procrastinate on? What takes you out of your comfort zone?

Whatever it is, chances are that's your bottleneck of the business, and you should work on that.

Attacking the bottleneck head-on is how you move the needle

Think of addressing the bottleneck as unclogging a blocked pipe.

It's really just that one specific blockage that's holding up the show for everything else.

If you want things to start flowing again, you have to only focus on that 1 specific blockage.

Everything else is already "good enough" and won't make any difference even if you keep focusing on it (or any difference made will only be marginal).

Of course, attacking the bottleneck is one thing, attacking it correctly is another.

One strategy you can try is be brave and make a big change.

After you've identified the bottleneck, you need to correctly remedy the issue too.

Pour conclure

The hardest part isn't finding the bottleneck -- it's having the courage and consistency to actually work on it instead of hiding behind busy work.

But that's exactly what separates businesses that grow from those that stagnate.

Time to get uncomfortable.

With thanks,
Jay

What I've built:

Zylvie - High-converting cart software to sell your digital products and subscriptions

Zlappo - Automate your tweets across all your Twitter/X accounts to get sales on auto-pilot