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Top 100 Businessman - Cody Lister Share His Best Advice - 39

Cody is the founder of MarketDoc where he helps marketers, business owners, solopreneurs and bloggers get more customers from smarter content marketing. He's also a co-host of the Content Promotion Summit. Here's his business advice for aspiring entrepreneurs:

"Many first-time entrepreneurs don't follow the Customer Development Model (the Steve Blank school of thought). They won't presell their product. They avoid surveying their market, meeting or calling people from their target audience before they pony up substantial money and time building a product."

"In other words, too often first-timers build a product behind closed doors and don't get the feedback necessary to ensure they get buy in for their idea. As a result, they don't reach product-market fit and end up building a product that fails or succeeds by mere chance, not by calculated steps."

"Don't build your product behind closed doors. Get feedback and validate your idea." @codyblister


"I recommend that first-time entrepreneurs take this as a real wake up call to avoid making excuses for not getting meaningful product validation before spending resources on development. You need at least 95% confidence that the thing you're working on will be predisposed to some initial success. There are too many other factors out there working against you when you're first starting out and are tight on resources that make the road of entrepreneurship hard enough as-is. Don't make it more difficult for yourself by building a bunch of features no one really wants to pay for."

"Avoid the common mistake of aiming to be the next Facebook. Achieve product-market fit by focusing on building one core feature better than the competition and make sure that feature solves a big pain point for your audience. Don't get lost in creating a bunch of features off-the-bat."

"Keep your first product extremely barebones. Get clear product validation from your target customer before you spend any time or money building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Start small. Invest more resources in product development as you generate enough operating income to cover your ongoing research and development expenses. Hold off on executing your product roadmap before you have enough consistent sales revenue to support that vision."

As a fellow freelance content marketer myself who's spent years building out content marketing strategies for my clients, I highly recommend Cody's epic new online course and educational platform, Content Marketing School.
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