Nibletz Staff
One of the most common worries of a startup company is whether or not they will succeed. You can have a great idea, a solid business model and a business plan that is watertight for growth. However, none of that is a guarantee for a company to be a success. The world is full of opportunities and with the birth of thousands of young companies waiting to swim with the big fish out there, the competition is fierce. A startup needs a leader with enough tenacity to take on the many uncertain and ambiguous challenges that are involved with starting a company. There are many of these challenges ahead and you have to decide if you are ready for them right now.
Unfortunately, 90% of new businesses will fail in the first year. It’s your job to be one of the 10% that succeeds. It’s a difficult truth to get your head around as an entrepreneur; especially as you likely are full to the brim with boundless optimism about the brilliance of your company. Reality is a bitter pill to swallow and if you hope to get ahead, you have to face it early. Hearing the statistics shouldn’t put you off wanting to do well. In actual fact, statistics that say you are likely to fail should make you want to work better and work harder to do well. It’s classic reverse psychology for companies.
Success is about more than the location of the company headquarters. It’s about more than where you start out – usually in the spare room of the house! It’s about noticing the popularity of your product or service rising and hitting the market at the right time. It’s about expanding your business enough that the spare room no longer suffices. That you have to bring in more staff, move to a larger office space and need Windows VPS with RDP to cope with the sheer volume of work and staff numbers. Everything down to the equipment you have to expand into should be taken into consideration. It’s needing more of everything because what you have just doesn’t last you enough for the success you are gaining. Ultimately, it’s about putting your all into your startup and guiding it exactly where you need it to go. It’s because of all this that it’s important to understand what it is you need to succeed with the big dogs and not be the local one hit wonder. There are six major bites of the apple that you need to understand to get to the core of your success, and we’ve put these together for you below:
Customers.
Your company cannot succeed without customers. Identifying the potential market and figuring out their unmet needs is essential for success. You need to ask yourself what it is you can provide that others cannot. It doesn’t matter whether what you offer is that on a large scale or a more niche opportunity, you have to be able to foresee whether the work will dry up too soon. Look at the need versus the market and you should have your answer as to whether you will be able to make a long-term go of your dreams.
Product
So, we’ve talked about meeting an unmet need, but how do you figure that out? Focus groups! You see reality TV shows that portray business wannabe’s who ask focus groups about a proposed product, and do their market research, only to go against what the public want. Never do this! The only way you are going to be able to bring in more people to buy your product is to listen to what it is that they want. Research is crucial here and reading articles like this one about how you should stay steady with your product from planning through to development is going to help you. Work out your costs to make sure you are going to be able to get back some of the money you have spent in profits.
Timing
As with most things, timing is everything. You have to bring your company and your product at the exact right moment that they need you to. Every single industry has a lifecycle and there is a limit on the amount of time you have to bring the product to the public eye, before people move on and want something else. You have to time it perfectly so that you don’t bring your new innovation to market too soon, and you can read more about how that can affect your business here. When it comes to working out the best time for you, it’s going to take some research and watching market trends to know for sure.
Competition
Every startup that has an idea they want to bring to the market will be aware of the fact they will have competition out there. The key is to make sure you don’t have too much of it before you bring your product to market. If you are finding that you have a lot more competition than you realize, then it’s worth noting that you are entering a saturated industry and your product likely will not succeed, unless it can offer something above and beyond. This is the reason that studying the competition is so important. Not just what their product is, but how they market it and who they aim it towards. This type of insight will allow you to understand how you can best your competition.
Finance
Money makes the world go around. It also will be the thing that brings your product to the market. Planning ahead is key here, as you have to understand how much up-front capital you will need to put into your product development. You also have to plan for the gap between accounts payable and accounts receivable. The financial risk you will be anticipating doesn’t have to be huge, but it does have to be enough to give you time to plan solidly. Your business – as like every other one – will require money to get started. Business loans like these can get you there, but you have to work out your profit and loss projection and come up with contingency plans in case something goes wrong.
Team
It’s a given that as a startup, you need to have the best people on board with you to get your product ready. You should have specialists in all departments, and the most important will be those who can understand the customers even better than you can. Technical experts, IT experts and those who are charming enough to handle marketing and PR will be essential assets to the team that will bring your product to success. The costs of hiring the right team can be high, it’s true, but is this an investment that you would be willing to skimp on? We didn’t think so!
Your success is going to very much depend on these six elements working in perfect synchronicity. You want to be able to bridge the gap between rushing in too far to impress the customers, with having a successful product model that you can offer. It’s important that you evaluate every opportunity, identify every weakness and look for the ways your startup can fail before it does so you can catch it early. You success will depend on you – are you ready to go and get it?
