Business Adviser

Managing Growth is About Doing the Math

By Alex Levy
CEO and lead designer, MyVoice

In the one-and-a-half years MyVoice has been in business, growth has been a constant. While it’s an enviable position for a startup, managing it does come with challenges.

MyVoice develops mobile technology to help people with speech disabilities communicate. Since launching it in April 2011 we have been taken aback by the interest in this product. To date we have 13,000 users in 30 countries. To put that in context, a top company in the traditional communications hardware space might sell about 10,000 units a year.

For a company in the tech space that competes with well-established, large incumbents, we’ve learned a lot in that short time. The first and most significant thing is that in our world it’s all too easy to think your technology will sell itself. In our case, we had a wonderful product that made sense and people were motivated to buy it.

All that may be true, but there is an important ratio at work that you have to take into account. By way of example, let’s say one in 10 prospects chooses you over your competitors and your projections are 10,000 users. It’s easy to forget you would need 100,000 contacts to achieve that.

Here is some other math to consider: the relationship between product and marketing metrics. If your marketing efforts rate a 10 and you have substandard product that scores a zero, multiply the two together and your output is zero. If your product is a 10 but your sales and marketing are zero, the result is the same.

We all know that maximum exposure is critical when starting out. It’s important to decide early in the process what the identity and message for your product and your company will be. Entrepreneurs don’t have billions of dollars larger organizations do to make it happen. So a good first step is to create a message that is as simple as humanly possible, and requires less effort to convey. The MyVoice’s message is really, really simple: “It’s easy, affordable and it will make your life better”.

Also, don’t fall into the habit of talking about every single feature of your product or service. That holds true whether you have a tech company or a Yoga studio. If we had advertised MyVoice by listing all 50 or so features, no one would remember a single one. Pick the ones you want to be known for and say it over and over.

We’re also an organization that relies almost exclusively on online marketing. The first thing you need to understand when in that game is where your natural customers are. We started out by doing extensive customer surveys and analytics to find out where they were, what they liked to buy, and why. The results surprised us.

We thought the largest users would be people with aphasia (i.e. language impairment from a stroke or brain injury). Research however showed the number one users by far would be kids on the autism spectrum, the second was cerebral palsy, and aphasia came in third. Not only did this help focus our marketing efforts, it drove us to develop access features to meet specific challenges for those populations.

Within that community you also have to find your best customers. There is always the tendency to really want to push to achieve the big deals. In our case, an example would be selling into school boards. A lot of new businesses fail to realize that getting the tougher accounts can take twice as much time and effort, which are resources you don’t always have.

A better approach is to view new customer opportunities equally. It makes strategic sense to focus on the “easy sells” that are ready to buy today. In that way you can keep your selling costs down, and your returns higher, and go after the tougher sells when you’ve gained some traction.