11) Minimum Viable Business for growing Customer numbers

As this is the last minimum I want to reiterate that this list isn’t a waterfall plan. However, for any business this is the final minimum they hope to end up with!

At this stage I tend to promote an emphasis on Customer self service (via help videos, scaffolding etc) as you invariably want to scale quickly without the need for lots of bodies to answer the phone. However, it doesn’t take away from the fact that inevitably you’ll need a support desk (or account manager’s or customer success… you get the idea!). What tools have you got to help when things go wrong. Obviously, you want to automate as much as possible, but the point of a minimum is that manual systems will suffice until they don’t – the key is being ready and upgrading your manual processes before they become a problem. Now this is getting in to managing teams of people, but the key insight is to ensure you have evidence to show that time is being “wasted” doing a job manually that could be automated. A simple ROI on the time to build the tools can give you the pay back period.