Want to achieve growth like a big start up – even if you are a solopreneur?

While we can’t promise you billions, we can promise growth in your business if you take a page from the “unicorns” (super successful tech start ups) and hack your business.

Here are the basic steps for hacking your solo business:

Set a Goal

Goal setting is the first step to almost anything worthwhile in life. And, it is the foundational step to the biz hacking process. You need to know where you are going in order to get there. The key to setting a good goal is that it needs to be measurable and actionable. Just saying – “I want to be more successful” is a terrible goal statement. Even – “I want to grow my e-mail list” lacks specificity. You want to set a goal with a quantity and a deadline attached.

You also want to make sure that your goal is narrow enough to complete. “Grow e-mail list” is something that will never be completed. “Grow e-mail list by 2% might be completed – but it isn’t in your control. How are you going to grow your e-mail list?

Here’s an appropriately bite-sized goal: look at the co-schedule report to see what the most popular content on my blog was for the previous week and promote that content to social media.

Create the Experiment

To know whether or not your new strategy will be successful, you need to create an experiment. In order to do that, you need to have a baseline to measure improvement from. This is why it is important to know what your numbers are before you start to make any changes. Once you know your baseline, make a guess about how much of an effect your change will have.

For the example I gave about promoting blog content, my experiment statement would be:

For 4 weeks, I am going to promote my 3 most popular blog posts from the past month on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In. I am going to promote the post daily on Twitter and twice on the other social media channels. I think that this change will result in a 10% increase in traffic to my website.

Measure the Results

To know whether or not the experiment worked, you would need to look at the traffic data for the website. For an experiment like this, I would track weekly and end the experiment in a month.

Learn from the Data

Once you have run the experiment, examine the results. Were they what you thought they would be? What will your next tweak be?

Most businesses are 6 or 7 tweaks away from being profitable. Keep tweaking and you’ll keep growing.