Thanks for stopping by! This post is part of my new series on starting a business from scratch. If you haven’t already, check out the first post in the series, how to build a website for a new business.

In this post, we’ll cover the steps you need to take before launching your new business. Whether you’re brick and mortar, online-only or something in between, these are a few crucial steps you can’t miss if you want to attract the right audience and turn it into a group of loyal customers.

This process is based on what we did before launching Fitness With Cindy, a senior fitness channel started in August 2018. Don’t forget to subscribe so you can follow and learn every step of the way as we grow this new business!

[convertkit form=5263448]

Steps To Take Before Launching A New Business

1. Zero In On Your Target Audience And Figure Out The Problem You Solve

There are two things that form the foundation of any profitable business idea: a niche audience and a solution to a problem. Look at any successful business and at its core, you’ll find these two things.

Uber serves busy people on the go by providing on-demand rides.

Old Navy provides a stylish, affordable apparel option to budget-conscious shoppers.

Fitness With Cindy makes it easy for older adults to find age-appropriate workouts in the comfort of their home.

Zeroing in on a niche audience is important because you can’t serve everyone—at least not at first. Trying to do so is a recipe for failure. Instead, pick one core audience and serve it incredibly well.

Figuring out the problem you solve is important because people don’t pay for products, they pay for solutions. If you’ve ever purchased a piece of workout equipment, you know this to be true. You probably weren’t dying to have a treadmill taking up half your guest room; instead, you bought it because it promised to help you fit into your old jeans.

Get clear on what that promise is for your company before you do anything else.

2. Build Your Website

Before you open your doors—physical or virtual—you must build a website.

The internet is the first place consumers turn when exploring an interest, researching shopping options and ultimately, making a purchase. Without a website, you completely miss out on this buying process (also known as the sales funnel).

Even a single-page website with your contact information and hours of operation is better than nothing, although I definitely recommend checking out this post to make your website as attractive as possible to potential customers.

For a crash course on building your website from scratch, start here.

3. Create The Appropriate Social Media Channels

Your social media channels are second only to your website in helping people find you and learn about you online. In fact, in a recent study Facebook alone influenced 52% of consumers’ purchases, both online and offline.

The key to using social media effectively for your business is not trying to be on all channels at once. Save that for when your business blows up and you can hire a full-time social media manager. Instead, as with your audience, focus on reaching a smaller number of the right people and doing it really well.

For Fitness With Cindy, a website targeting adults over 55, it didn’t make sense to spend time on younger-skewing platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Instead, we opted for two channels where older adults spend the most social media time: Facebook and YouTube.

We started the Fitness With Cindy YouTube channel with a welcome video for new visitors

It’s a good idea to set up your social media channels as soon as you’ve decided on a business name so no one else beats you to the punch on claiming them.

4. Come Up With A Minimum Viable Product

When you’re just starting a new business, your mind is like a volcano exploding with creative ideas. You want to do it all and you want to do it now.

That’s great! But I’m here to rain on your parade of amazing ideas and tell you this: instead of trying to do and sell 100 different things, instead focus on creating what’s known as an MVP, or minimum viable product.

As its name suggests, the minimum viable product is the lowest and most basic version of what you intend to sell. If you’re starting a gluten-free meal delivery service, maybe your MVP is a Friday-only gluten-free lunch delivery to people in a nearby office complex.

The goal is to test the viability of your idea—to see if people will actually pay for it—before you invest a ton of time and money into something no one has ever heard about. If you can sell your MVP to a handful of people within your target audience from step 1, it’s a green light to move full-speed ahead on all those awesome ideas I rained on earlier.

We’re still figuring out exactly what revenue model will be most profitable for Fitness With Cindy, be it a monthly subscription option, paid workshops, physical products, or something else, but before doing any testing we started with an MVP to prove that the concept of a senior fitness channel could actually make money.

For us, the minimum viable product we decided on was a 4-Week Core Bootcamp designed to help seniors target belly fat around the midsection. After building buzz (see step 6) among our target audience, we sold 31 Bootcamp registrations, thus proving the concept and making the case for investing further resources into building the business.

5. Set A Launch Date

Once you’ve completed steps 1 through 4, it’s time to choose a launch date. This is significant because once you tell the world about it, there’s no turning back. Eeek!

The launch date you choose is entirely dependent on what makes sense for your business and your industry, but as a rule of thumb I’ve found that six weeks is generally a great time frame between finalizing your MVP and launching it for sale. It gives you enough time to get the word out, build excitement and complete your pre-launch logistics, but it’s not so much time that you’ll second guess yourself or lose audience interest.

We began announcing in October that the Fitness With Cindy Core Bootcamp was coming and officially launched it on November 14. We picked this date because it coincided with the ramping up holiday season when many people are eating indulgently yet worried about how they look for holiday outings. We also figured that once the initial buzz died down, the New Year and all the fitness resolutions that go along with it would present a great opportunity to hype it up again.

Set your launch date, announce it via your website and social media channels, then move on to step 6 and build buzz.

6. Begin Building Buzz About The Launch

In my experience, this is the trickiest step to nail and the one business owners most frequently underestimate.

Building buzz about an idea is hard. It takes a lot of legwork, leveraging your personal and professional contacts, and talking about your idea until everyone you know is sick of hearing about it, then asking them to talk about your idea too. This is what it takes to get a new business off the ground.

The thing is, flocks of people aren’t just going to find you on the internet and buy from you right off the bat. That comes with time, after many months of authority building, search engine optimization and other marketing.

For 99% of businesses, the buyers for your minimum viable product are going to come from within your network—people you know or secondhand connections from people you know. This is the time to build buzz with those people.

You can build buzz in any number of ways, including but not limited to sharing updates on social media, emailing people in your contact list, asking friends to share your posts or pass along contacts who might be interested, handing out flyers and business cards, and so much more.

The local paper did a story on our launch after we sent out a press release

Here are some of the things we did to build buzz around the Fitness With Cindy launch:

Had Cindy announce the new website and upcoming bootcamp in all of her in-person fitness classes
Submitted a press release to local media
Shared regular updates on our business Facebook account and personal Facebook pages
Asked friends to share the aforementioned Facebook updates
Held a fitness gear giveaway and collected email addresses for entries
Emailed our list of email contacts once a week with updates
Posted a free 10-minute core workout on YouTube intended to serve as a sample of the bootcamp material

Starting a business is so much work, but it’s also so worth it! Even just a few short months since launching Fitness With Cindy, it’s already fun to look back and see how far we’ve come.