How many times have you heard of a startup idea, checked them out, thought that it won’t go anywhere, then a few months or years later you hear about it growing tremendously? I know that I have done that many times before. So, I started tracing what different startups do in order to succeed. The short answer is that they never give up, but instead they follow a process.

An event is something that happens or occurs in a certain place and time. It usually gets us excited and ready to do something. But this is entirely different than a process which is a serious of continuous actions targeted towards an end goal. For example starting a business is a process that includes fine tuning, funding, expanding, innovating, supporting, building a community, …etc. A long process isn’t as easy as an event. In fact, a process is more continuous, it takes a lot more motivation and passion, and it is more rewarding.

Great ideas aren’t enough because I believe that an idea is an event that takes place due to a number of driving factors such as needs and inspiration. However, incubating this idea and making it a successful business is a process. Following through this process and overcoming the obstacles is what will take your business to the next steps.

Before you jump to the definitions, you need to know that there is a very fine line between each of them. I am sure that you have already guessed the huge debate. Seth Godin has a good description of the differences from marketing perspective. Here is my attempt at simplifying the definitions.

• Goals are end results that you would like to achieve.
• Strategies are ideas on how to achieve those goals.
• Tactics are steps to execute the strategies.

Let’s look at some examples of goals.

1. Increase total revenue by 20%
2. Lose 50 pounds.
3. Run 100 miles.

Notice that good goals should be measurable, because you always want to know how far you are from achieving your goal.

After knowing your goal, you need to explore different strategies. For this post, lets choose the first goal. Here are some examples of strategies:

1. Improve your current product offering.
2. Offer new product(s).

Notice that strategies are ideas but NOT steps of how to achieve the goal. Usually, businesses follow more than one strategy to achieve one goal. But how to know which strategy to choose? That’s where feedback comes in. I have my opinions, you have yours. Let’s discuss and find the best option. Remember that developing a strategy isn’t an easy process. There is a million other things you need to consider when developing your strategy. For example, you need to have a good estimate on whether this strategy is going to increase your revenue by 10%, 20%, or 30%?

After choosing a strategy, you need to explore all different tactics to execute this strategy. Again, for this post. lets choose the first strategy. Here is an example of two tactics:

Tactic #1:

1. Survey the existing customer base about the most requested features in your product.
2. Prioritize these requests.
3. Start adding these features to you product.
4. Inform your existing customer base about the new offering.
5. Market the hell out of the new feature set.

Tactic #2:

1. Focus on improving the usability of your product.
2. Stress your product differentiator and make it stand out more.

As you can imagine, usually there are many tactics for every strategy. Therefore, if you have a good strategy and not very good tactics, you won’t end up in a too bad of a situation. It is much worse, if you have a bad strategy even with brilliant tactics. Therefore, you need to be very careful with your strategy before you move forward with developing tactics.