10 Critical Levers to Focus your Tech Venture on its most Strategic Win Zones

Every startup knows that growth is of the utmost importance. During the best of times, that’s what investors want to see. This means creating more endpoints - or what I like to call sandboxes - by expanding with new products, geographies, segments, and channels. However, this isn’t always the best path to take.

After all, we aren’t necessarily in the best of times right now. Pursuing growth for the sake of growth isn’t going to be the best strategy. Instead, startups need to zero in on the sandboxes where they can be most successful. This is the best way to find momentum.

The first step is to understand each sandbox and recognize that the further you get from your core, the more complicated each new sandbox becomes. The next step is to identify which sandboxes give you the best chance of controlling the niche. In other words, where do you have pricing power and customers that need you more than you need them?

Once you start to understand your best sandboxes, you can use that knowledge to move from product-market-fit to product-market-dominance. This means going for market power, allocating your best employees in the right place, and retreating in certain areas when things aren’t working out. To put it another way, you have to exploit areas of success before exploring others if you want to find product-market-dominance.

Ultimately, the goal should be to zero in on the sandboxes where you can win and build momentum. To dive into this a little deeper, I put together a video explaining 10 levers that will help you focus on the sandboxes.