Now, the way you go about it is you stop thinking about a new market from the standpoint of your company. See it through your customers' eyes: what are the pain points in their lives? Then work backwards to how your company might be relevant. But don't think about it in terms of, you're a widget company that's looking for a new way to sell widgets. That's often not what people want, and by definition that's not going to be a new market. Steve Jobs didn't ask, are you looking for an iPad? They stepped back and they looked at what was important in people's lives and whether technology could facilitate getting that done.

Counterintuitively, the best way to grow big fast is to start small and highly targeted. If you try to do too many things at once you're going to be slow in execution, and your limited resources are going to be unfocused and deliver poorly against your goals. Pick a target market that can provide quick feedback and reference customers for broader groups of later adopters. Bring the market something that is simple, scrappy, and as inexpensive as possible. Do it fast, not necessarily to make a lot of money, but to learn a lot at low cost. And take what you learn and decide what's going to be a winner or not. A conundrum is that companies that don't innovate will die, but most innovations will fail. So fail fast and learn when to double down your investment.

A lot of new markets are derailed by making financial forecasts the way they do in the existing business and then holding executives accountable to meeting unrealistic numbers. Moreover, a lot of companies funnel too much money into new-market efforts, before they're ready to absorb that wealth. To succeed, a company needs a well-disciplined, but not overfunded, effort to pursue a portfolio of initiatives; and to learn rapidly and think about expense management before making fictional revenue forecasts.