September Monthly Roundup
Business trends to watch, Spotlight on Interesting Women-built businesses, Book of the Month, and Valuable resources for early-stage founders
🪶Welcome to the September edition of Inspirele’s Monthly Newsletter. It’s getting cooler here in the UK - it feels like summer just peeked to say hello, and now autumn is swiftly on its way. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you’re enjoying your weekend and the changing seasons.
This is our first ‘monthly roundup’ newsletter featuring trends to watch, spotlight on interesting women-built businesses, book of the month, and valuable resources for early-stage founders. Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions on topics to cover in future monthly newsletters.
🚀 Business Trends to Watch
The power of ‘niche’ markets
Niche markets are fertile ground for innovation as these markets are often underserved and overlooked. If you build the right solution for this market, you are likely to see considerable growth - there is less direct competition from larger companies, and it allows you to charge premium prices for the value of specialised solutions.👉🏽 Consider how you might leverage niche markets to create a powerful competitive advantage - customers in niche markets are great early adopters of new solutions! But remember to focus on branding and leverage community building when targeting niche markets - your messaging needs to be clear, consistent, and resonating deeply with your target audience
Sustainability becoming a core differentiator
Brands that integrate sustainability into their DNA (vs just a nice to have) are seeing stronger brand loyalty and attracting investment from foundations and impact investors looking into the ESG space. ‘Doing good while doing well’ is not just in fashion, it is a must-have to appeal to customers.
👉🏽 Think about integrating sustainability into your business. It doesn’t just apply to physical products. Even digital companies can go green by reducing energy use, adopting remote work policies, and channelling revenue to support sustainable living
The ever popular AI
By now, AI is more than just a buzzword. From automated customer service to AI-driven recommendations, AI is leading the way for solutions to be hyper personalised, tailoring experiences to individual customer needs. Platforms offering AI-as-a-Service are growing, enabling small businesses to implement advanced analytics and predictive modelling without much technical expertise.👉🏽 If you’re new to AI, it’s definitely time to assess your business idea/solution to see where it can add value, and invest in learning about AI through online courses/workshops so that you can make informed decisions
🌍 Spotlight on Interesting Women-built Businesses
This month, we’re spotlighting Katherine Kostereva, a 47 year old Ukrainian woman who bootstrapped her tech startup, Creatio using a no-code platform. Bootstrapping alone got her to a successful business, with her software being used by 800 organisations and in more than 100 countries. She didn’t raise VC money until in 2021, which made Creatio a unicorn, valued at $1.2billion. The interesting thing about Katherine is that she didn’t raise VC money for funding but instead as a marketing tool!
"We wanted to use it as a marketing event to up-level the brand awareness of Creatio among large enterprises"
We absolutely love her unique take on the unicorn label - not as a need, but as a vehicle for further growth.
📚 Book of the Month: "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries
This month’s must-read is a classic: "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries. The book introduces the concept of the "lean" methodology, a scientific approach to creating and managing startups that grow quickly while avoiding unnecessary risks and loss of time/money.
Our favourite takeaways
Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) instead of the perfect product: Identify what is the simplest, functional version of your solution and build that. Launch it to gather early feedback, and get a sense of what else people want before you go ahead to develop the actual product. The MVP doesn’t even need to be a product, it could be a landing page or a demo video explaining the concept
Test your Value hypothesis and Growth hypothesis:
Value hypothesis is tested by checking if what you are building creates value for your target customer i.e. ‘does it solve a real, painful problem of theirs?’. You can test this through a survey, customer interviews, or a landing page / social media post
Growth hypothesis is tested by checking how your customers find your product/service. For instance, you may think that the best way to grow your business is through social media but upon asking initial customers how they find you, most of them say they heard of you from friends/family instead of social media. This helps you understand that your growth hypothesis was wrong, and you should instead focus on growing word-of-mouth referrals
Innovation Accounting: “a way of evaluating progress when all the metrics typically used in an established company (revenue, customers, ROI, market share) are effectively zero.” This is a game-changer for early stage entrepreneurs! When you are pre-revenue, don’t track sales. Instead, track actions that are tangible and measurable to keep you going and learning e.g. number of customers talked to each week, number of customers that tried your product,…
If you haven’t read it yet, do check it out! Highly recommend this book for any entrepreneur looking to streamline processes and maximize their chances of success with limited resources.
🔗 Our monthly pick of resources
Hello Alice: A free platform for small business owners - their Business Health Score tool is super interesting, it gives you a quick measure of your financial fitness. They also have regular updates on available grants and opportunities for small business owners
Mind the Product: A comprehensive resource for entrepreneurs focusing on building and scaling great products. Check out their AI Knowledge Hub to explore its impact on product management!
That’s it for September, folks! Entrepreneurship is a journey filled with highs and lows, but with the right mindset, support, and resources, you’re well on your way to success. Stay inspired, stay connected, and keep pushing boundaries.
Until next time,
Nareen Sidhu
Team Inspirele
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