Page 101 - The $100 Startup_ Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love

Let’s break down the planning process into a very simple exercise: defining the
mission statement for your business (or your business idea) in 140 characters or
less. That is the maximum amount of text for an update on Twitter and a good
natural limit for narrowing down a concept. It may help to think of the first two
characteristics of any business: a product or service and the group of people who
pay for it. Put the two together and you’ve got a mission statement:

We provide [product or service] for [customers].

As described in Chapter 2, it’s usually better to highlight a core benefit of your
business instead of a descriptive feature. Accordingly, you can revise the
statement a bit to read like this:

We help [customers] do/achieve/other verb [primary benefit].

Focusing like this helps you avoid “corporate speak” and drill down to the real
purpose of the business as it relates to your customers. Here are a few examples:

If you have a dog-walking service, the feature is “I walk dogs.” The benefit is
“I help busy owners feel at ease about their dogs when they’re not able to be
with them.”

If you sell knitted hat patterns, the benefit is something like “I help people be
creative by making a hat for themselves or someone close to them.”

If you make custom wedding stationery, you might say, “I help couples feel
special about their big day by providing them with amazing invitations.”

How about you? What is the 140-character (or less) mission statement of your
business idea?

Jen and Omar followed the $100 Startup model: Focusing on the specific
combination of their unique skills, they made an interesting product that other
people also valued. They gave their customers what they wanted without hiding
their real lives: Their website contains blog entries on their home life, complete
with cat photos—but doesn’t go into all the details of making prints that most
customers would find irrelevant.

They chose a marketable idea and were encouraged by their first day of sales.
They kept costs low, bootstrapping out of their tiny apartment and not borrowing
a single dollar. As the business grew rapidly, they regrouped, taking stock of
what was working (make more maps) and what wasn’t (stop going to the post
office all the time).