Objectives

The overarching objective here is to get initial customers and validate product-market fit. You want real, paying users who stick around—people who see enough value in your solution to invest both time and money. In practical terms, that means you’re laser-focused on turning your big idea into an actual product that solves a tangible problem. You test and refine, scrap and rebuild, until you’ve created something customers can’t live without.

You’re also aiming to develop a basic repeatable process for selling, onboarding, and keeping customers happy. At this point, you probably don’t have all the fancy metrics dashboards or a multi-step pipeline in your CRM. But you do want to document the minimum process that keeps everything from descending into an unmanageable mess. When folks come on board, they should see a semblance of organization, even if it’s just a basic project plan in a shared document.Finally, you want to walk away from this stage with a clear and well-defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The ICP is narrow but powerful, focusing only on those customers you can close quickly and onboard in days. If you can show that this initial slice of customers love the product, you’ll have the foundation for the next stage—where you scale out that model to a broader market segment.