Every entrepreneur starts a new venture with one goal in mind, to find the right target audience for their product or service and convert them into sales to make sustainable profits. But how can you achieve this goal? No matter how unique your new business is or what your target market is, the first challenge is always to find first customers and maintain them. The major mistake for most start-ups is the failure to identify their specific initial market share and dominating it before expanding to serve the broader market.

The Minimum Viable Segment (MVS) is a business model devised to enable you to achieve business growth through smaller customer fragments. Of course, this serves the purpose of efficiency and proper flow of business with minimum capital. For a startup to reach its estimated targets in monitory and clientele terms, you should come up with a minimum viable segment model. Consequently, this often translates into a manageable business.

How to Create a Growth Model with Fragmented Clients Approach

The online platform is the prominent and most efficient marketplace in the current market systems. There are billions of potential customers in one place. With the recent developments in technology especially in the mobile industry, many people can now access the internet either through personal computers or via their handheld mobile devices. Indeed, this offers any business with over billions of potential customers, if smartly tapped, can unlock its potential. The essence of this article is to describe how you can convert all these potential customers into actual viable customers. Where do you start with such a huge market?

To achieve this, you have to come up with a bottom-up approach as opposed to the top-bottom tactic that many start-ups dive into. Poorly advised business owners often engage in the top-bottom approach that later grows into a confusing and unmanageable business. Whenever you launch a new product or service into the market, you have millions of customers scattered all over, which makes it hard to focus on a specific group of customers (initial market segment). In most cases, businesses are more driven to sell and generate income, which seems to be the ideal plan but in the long run, it turns out to be a fault. To avoid the confusion and building a capable MVS, begin by deciding what not to do and what features you need to focus on.

When designing and developing a product you always have its perfect customers to address a given need. These customers should form the initial market segment – customers who are likely to buy the product or services at the price you have set and according to your expectations. They are a fraction of your entire target customer base. Your initial market segment is usually a small portion that you can easily and swiftly dominate and generate sufficient revenue for your venture.

How big should your MVS be? Indeed, this will depend on your type of business and how many initial customers your resources can handle. You need to make your segment as small as you can handle because your goal is to dominate it. Of course, this will equip you with experience and credibility to handle expanded segments but also the segment needs to be big enough to sustain the business financially. You can choose to start with 500 customers or even less and develop from there.

How to Choose an Ideal MVS?

First, you need to highlight your customers’ specific needs and characteristics and then analyse which of these characteristics defines a market segment. You can do this repeatedly until you acquire a sufficient segment that is manageable and viable regarding revenue generation. If you successfully dominate your initial market segment, it means you are the leader in your line of business and ready to expand to other segments.