Your notes

Instructions

How to select a business model

The idea grid lets you combine lifestyles, business types, and marketing tactics to create over a hundred distinct business models — a unique mix of advantages and limitations that affect how fast you can start and scale.

#1 — Lifestyle & business type. Review your notes. Focus on your answers to mastery, mission, market pull, and business types lessons. Think about different business types and what skills or team you will need to achieve your revenue milestones from the market pull lesson. Think about which business lifestyle would be most suitable to achieve your goals in the most direct path possible.

If you have the necessary skills and the network of freelancers to help you build, market, and run your product/service, you may be on your way to the Freedom business. If you need co-founders and consider getting into an accelerator, incubator, or a startup co-working space, Control might be a suitable option.

Remember that selecting a business type is like choosing the right tool for the job — your mission. Your business model should evolve on an ongoing basis, adapting to the evolving needs of your audience. For example, you may start with a Freedom business with an information product and a community and later evolve into a technology platform to leverage the community you built, using the revenue from your freedom business to get an office and hire a team to scale your business.

At this point in your entrepreneurial journey, select a combination of lifestyle and business type that would help you achieve your initial revenue milestone by maximizing your strengths.

#2 — Marketing tactic. Great ideas can fail if nobody knows about them. Marketing is often something startup founders overlook, thinking that their idea will sell itself. Prepare to invest 25 to 50% of your time and resources in marketing during your first few years or until you bring a full-time marketing executive on board. In the beginning, I recommend focusing on one tactic at a time, but as the time goes, you will learn how to stack them to get better results.

Regardless of what tactic you choose, you should invest a few hours every day in building the momentum of your business. Because you will spend a significant amount of time promoting your business, you should focus on tactics that you understand well. For example, if you are not a writer or cannot commit to posting with consistency, choosing content marketing is going to fail, unless you hire a dedicated social media marketing professional. However, if you lead with a personal brand, building a community or providing a service or consulting is easy because all you have to do is be yourself and engage with people.