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A year ago, Becky McCray and Sheila Scarborough were entrepreneurs with their own businesses who attended the SOBCon conference and decided to partner to start a business.  By September 2009, they had launched Tourism Currents to teach tourism professionals how to use social media.  In their first month, they generated a profit.  Today, they came back to SOBCon and shared the secrets of their success, with the caveat – these are not rules, the path has not been perfect, but it worked for them, so it could work for you too:

1. Set a deadline to launch your business.  They decided in May that they would launch in September, and stuck  to the deadline even as they learned their initial expectations of “How hard could it be?” were inaccurate.  Push forward and…
2. Don’t expect perfection of yourself. It is good to strive for this, but is better to find a way to open your doors to customers so you can…
3. Generate revenue while you test. Launch and iterate on your business based on feedback from your customers, what sells, what you’re good at, what is profitable, what you want to do.
4. Solve for a narrow target. This is very difficult because our natural tendency is to think it is easier to grow by going after a big market.  Trust that solving for a narrow market helps you focus on the best opportunities and will help you create great products and solutions that your customers help you sell through word of mouth.
5. Focus on your customer’s problems rather than the tools you’re selling to solve them.  Having this mindset allows you to evolve both your business plan and products to meet their needs.  This allows you to see that a different tool (your product or service), rather than a better one, might be the solution that helps you grow your business.