How to start a STARTUP
“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard” – Guy Kawasaki, AllTop Co-founder
Yes you have read that right. We get a lot of ideas and majority of us must have thought to implement it too. But do you know? 90% of the startups fail and 10% fail in the first year. There are a lot of reasons why founders fail badly, but the top reason is because of oversaturated market. Startups don’t fail because of failed products but they fail because already a handful of cheaper options are available. In this article I’ll be focusing on some tips of starting a startup that can certainly include your startup in the 10% startups who succeed
- Identify the need:
We get many cool ideas and much of them are innovative too. But are those ideas able to address a need? To see what is required and what is not research and observations play a very critical role. Research unveils those stats that are invaluable and helps you identify the hidden needs of people and the market. When such a need is identified, it is you who has to address the need by your ideas.
- Focus on your potential customers:
Focusing on market is important but focusing on your potential customers is much more important. Is your product for a certain age group? Targeted for a specific class of a society? Only for a certain region? Etc. When you have recognized your potential customers you need to make a bridge between the need and potential customers and see how your product/service can be useful.
- Have a working business plan:
Idea alone doesn’t make a difference but when the idea is organized and comprehensive, it does make a difference. Such a plan will help you in identifying things such as target audience, business needs, growth of a startup, breakdown of finances and financial needs and much more. The plan, if properly designed, can help you attain investors thus fulfilling the financial needs of a startup.
- MVP:
MVP – Minimum Viable Product is a very important part of a startup cycle. It is a proof of concept and can be utilized for testing and checking what customers think of your products. While testing, customers provide feedbacks which are really important and needs to be listed down in order to provide an amazing user experience. Besides this, it is useful to show your investors that you have worked on your idea and it has entered the testing phase and does have a potential to become successful.
- Feedback:
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” –Bill Gates.
Feedback which your customers provides should be accepted and taken with a positive frame of mind because these are the ones that will help improving your product/service like none. Improving product/service should always be the top priority because updates are always appreciated by the customer base. Joel Spolsky has summarized it in the best way as:
Every day that we spent not improving our products was a wasted day.