The rate at which a company expands has long been a major factor in its success. While growth is important, premature scaling is the cause of over 70% of startup failures. Here are seven steps to help you launch a successful startup. Long development times cause certain innovations to fail. 32 percent of innovation failures are due to choosing the wrong idea to innovate.
There’s always something that can be done to make a product or idea more original and defendable. Most inventions fail because entrepreneurs devote more resources to improving a product without consulting customers or gauging their desire to pay for and utilize it. In this article, we’ll take look at the 7 steps to build a successful startup.
1. Get A Good Startup Idea
Create a successful startup idea on purpose. This increases the likelihood that your concept has previously been identified and executed by others. If you choose this path, be very careful during the idea review and validation phases (more below). Remember that brilliant ideas only appear clever in retrospect, so don’t wait for inspiration.
Building a startup from concept to exit, on the other hand, can take more than a decade, so make sure your idea is sound before you begin.
2. Evaluation of Your Startup Idea
It’s time to use Google once you’ve decided on a single idea. Look for a similar product or service that currently exists. In most cases, a lot of fierce competition in the space is a bad omen. A complete lack of competition, on the other hand, is a poor indicator — it could signal a lack of market need or some other unknown problem impeding the development of your specific business idea.
Companies in the market should ideally be partially solving the problem you’re seeking to solve (showing an existing market need), but in a different way (leaving you space for innovation, differentiation, and added value).
3. Write a Business Plan For a Successful Startup
Writing a business strategy and regularly updating it as you acquire experience is the best option early on. A well-written business plan can help you attract investors. It might also assist you demonstrate to business partners that you have a thriving company. A successful startup strategy is your key to success in a competitive environment.
4. Minimum Viable Product Stage
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a set of features that must be included in order to test a product with your target audience without requiring complex engineering. Maximum feedback with minimal effort. You may witness the practical impact of your product in the real world with an MVP and then improve it.
Do a complete Media Validation; this is the most crucial stage for a startup. If you don’t do it well, you risk squandering a lot of money, time, effort, and emotions on something that will fail from the start. The validation phase is also perhaps the most difficult because most entrepreneurs would be on their own, with limited resources. Validation success is likely the most critical factor in convincing others — team members, investors, clients, and, most importantly, yourself – that you are on the right course.
5. Fundraising and Establishment of Capital
Taking money is most likely the ideal strategy if your project is a truly creative, scalable startup that is developing a new industry and has to grow as quickly as possible to remain a market leader. It will help you to expand as quickly as possible without having to worry too much about spending more than you earn in the early years. Furthermore, if you are a B2B business, the proper investors will have a significant network that will assist you in finding advisers, staff, and even clients.
If your product is in a narrower niche with little upside potential, it may be preferable to grow more slowly and sustainably without diluting your ownership & successful startup. Consider if your own goals and most importantly – risk tolerance align with the goals of your investors. If you take on funding, your investors would have an incentive to push you to be more ambitious and as a consequence- to take bigger risks.
6. Gaining Traction
Invest in non-organic growth; you’re not attempting to build a competitive company; instead, you’re trying to create a global monopoly in your market niche. This aggressive expansion entails more than just buying ads. It could imply offering your service at a loss to suffocate any potential competitors and grab market share as quickly as feasible.
Incentivizing Organic Growth; ideally, you’d have a product with a strong product-market fit, customers who love your product as a result of it, a market with plenty of potential to develop, and a sustainable, scalable & successful startup strategy that ensures your company won’t collapse under the weight of new employees. Under these conditions, your goal would be to incentivize growth of successful startup, and hands down the best growth channel is word of mouth – not only is it free, but it comes by default with a trusted recommendation.
7. Maximize Customer Feedback
Successful startup grows, customer service becomes a necessary evil in order to maintain selling more merchandise. That is unquestionably the incorrect strategy. A young company needs as much client input as possible, no matter how bad it sounds at the time. We have over a million firms on our platform at successful startups.co, and everyone of them receives an email from Founder + CEO Wil Schroter. (Click Reply to see how fast I answer!) We look at it as a million potential pieces of input rather than a million potential complaints.
And because all of our customers are also entrepreneurs, they provide fantastic feedback of successful startup! The lifeblood of a young startup’s product roadmap is maximizing consumer feedback. Every data point contributes to the product’s extremely formative nature. This encompasses everything from in-person customer encounters to back-and-forth tweets to after-hours voicemails. Because every consumer encounter tells a story about where the product is supposed to go, every data point important.