Every business is looking for success in the market. But why are some businesses successful and others failed in the market? I realized from my experience. The most unsuccessful startup or company doesn’t have the foundation for growth. In the early stage startup or new business from the corporation, they might feel satisfied with first market reactions from customers and during a certain period, the business is going quite well. They pour lots of money into marketing and advertisement. With those inputs on the market, business seems to going well. But once lake of marketing budget reveals the bottom of the ground and the initial market reaction is going to be weak and then the slope of business growth and revenue curve draw negative value on the marketing indicators. This is because there is no foundation for growth

I think every business has a different type of foundation to be successful growth. For example, retail market businesses should have diverse marketing channels and robust supply chains to get retail products to their store so that they can make revenue by selling them. This means that we need to understand what is the foundation of our business. Once we understand the core foundation for our business we can draw bigger pictures and spend business budgets more efficiently rather than wasting on holes in the bucket. Furthermore, we can set up a smart strategy for our successful business. Building a foundation becomes the seed of strategy and will make them to growth by themselves.

The design has lots of various faces in the business. Mostly we think of design as building visual elements for our products or services. But that is not all about design. Design is more about deeply understanding how we approach customers provide service value and let them be satisfied with our product or service. This whole process and blueprint is the “DESIGN” That is why I called it “Design is the first and last thing we should do”. In the first phase of design, We focus on the minds of customers about what they want to get and how they react to our future product, etc. This kind of understanding or research can be the foundation to build better products for customers. And also one of the things we shouldn’t do in this phase is that DO NOT ASK FOR CUSTOMERS ABOUT WHAT THEY WANT. People in the survey easily said “Yes I like it” as an answer to the survey. This becomes easily superficial and hard to find insight from customers. So Don’t do it

One of the reasons to build a foundation is exponentially making business in the growth phase. Without a foundation, it is hard to take off to that level of growth and easily waste their business budget on marketing channels. This is the most common mistake from early-stage startups or new businesses from corporations. As you know corporations have enough money to do it but early-stage startups don’t have enough budget to do it. Without building a foundation, the startup can easily become in a state of lacking financial resources. So build a foundation that can be a core element for customers’ values maximize them and expand along with your business growth.