To accelerate your growth you should explore external resources that can provide help. These can be city, county, state, federal, academic, and even corporate resources. Specific resources include grants, preferred vendor status, education, tools, training, connections, in-kind help, etc.You need to understand where your gaps are and where you could use the most help. Then begin to research where you can get some assistance. This research will be a lot of emailing, phone calling and even visiting some offices. It can take a while to find the optimal fit, but keep digging. You might be surprised how many people want to help and see you succeed! Examplese are: Dane Buy Local SBDC WBBC SBA Black Chamber Latino Chamber WEDC Madison Development Corp Madrep
You should complete the following tasks before proceeding to the current one.
For your business to survive and thrive you will need customers who not only buy from you once, but who return and refer others to your value proposition. When we think about customers, we think about those who are exchanging money for the thing we do. You may not be fully ready to accept money or fulfill the value proposition. However you can still get customers who will sign up for your product or service. Maybe they are willing to be on a wait list or pre-order list. Maybe they will actually buy a sample or buy an MVP you created during one of your experiments. See if you can actually connect with an ideal customer who is willing to buy your imperfect or early stage solution? You'll want to take care to note of the pricing, objections, feedback and other behaviors that prospective customers might exhibit. When you do make that early sale, you might find there are others similar to this first customer and then you can sell more and learn more! Once you start getting some early sales integrate that learning into the customer personas and canvas you might have developed. You are going to need these insights to understand something known as your 'total addressable market' and your service available market.
List of resources, subject matter experts, trusted partners, and tools that can be useful to complete the task.
Don't stop now! Just pick the very next stage-card that resonates with your business and continue working on the correspondent tasks.