When an unexpected opportunity in an adjacent vertical arises, dedicate a small amount of effort (e.g., 5%) to explore it, even if it's not on the immediate roadmap. This low-cost probe provides invaluable market feedback on your product's readiness for future expansion without derailing current priorities.
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Instead of random growth, businesses have five clear expansion paths: serve wealthier clients (upmarket), serve a mass market (downmarket), enter a new vertical (adjacent), generalize your solution (broader), or hyper-specialize (narrower). This provides a strategic map for growth.
Don't commit to a rigid career plan. Instead, treat your career like a product. Run small-scale experiments or 'MVPs'—like a 20% project, a volunteer role, or a teaching gig—to test your interest and aptitude for new skills before making a full commitment, then iterate based on the results.
In ROI-focused cultures like financial services, protect innovation by dedicating a formal budget (e.g., 20% of team bandwidth) to experiments. These initiatives are explicitly exempt from the rigorous ROI calculations applied to the rest of the roadmap, which fosters necessary risk-taking.
While doubling down on a proven strategy is usually wise, this rule can be broken when a new market offers exponentially greater (e.g., 100x) value per customer for the same operational effort. The potential upside is too significant to ignore, justifying the risk of a strategic test.
When moving beyond your initial niche, target adjacent verticals. For example, a company serving realtors should target mortgage brokers next, not an unrelated field like lawn maintenance. This strategy maximizes the transfer of product features, market knowledge, and potential word-of-mouth.
When deciding between deepening a vertical, adding adjacent ones, or going horizontal, analyze two key factors: the extent of product modification needed and your ability to market and sell to the new audience. This framework simplifies a complex strategic choice.
Intentionally scaling back your primary business and revenue targets creates the space necessary for creative exploration. This can lead to discovering more scalable and profitable opportunities that ultimately generate far greater success than the original, high-effort path.
To avoid distracting from its core business, Bolt tests new ventures like scooters and food delivery using a standardized playbook. A small team of 5-10 people is given a modest budget and a six-month timeline to build an MVP and show traction. If successful, they get more funding; if not, the project is shut down.
Growth isn't random; it can be planned along five vectors. From your current market, you can target higher-paying clients (upmarket), a larger volume of smaller clients (downmarket), different industries (adjacent), a wider category (broader), or a more focused sub-niche (narrower).
Instead of diversifying randomly, a more effective strategy is to expand into adjacent verticals. Leverage your existing, happy clients for introductions into these parallel industries. This approach uses your established credibility and relationships as a bridge to new markets, lowering the barrier to entry.
