Every entrepreneur starts a business with the aim of making money and growing it into a big sustainable venture. Most people fail on the way due to one reason or the other and some even give up on big dreams due to frustrations and loss of money. Every new business idea is either a hit or a miss. The founder begins with a product that they feel and think customers will need and embrace. It is therefore important for a starting entrepreneur to have the best mindset and employ the greatest approach to achieve growth and sustainability for any business.
It may take a long time than you anticipated for your business to gain popularity, and may require several changes in your original plan due to the changing market plans and unexpected competitors.
There are a number of theories and advice on what strategy to employ to hit the ground running, but your success will also depend on understanding the market, your location and the type of business you choose to start. Remember when starting a small business, your budget is limited and you need to use your resources wisely for maximum gains.
The startup approach you take should be at minimal cost and within your budget. There are a number of smart steps you can take to maximize your success rate without spending a lot of money.
Dreaming Big and Starting Smart
Every big business you see around today started as a simple idea, which was executed wisely and has been improved severally to make it what it is today. Before you start investing on your idea, it is important to view the idea in a broad perspective and have short-term, medium and long term plans for the business. Evaluate your motivations for a particular type of product and access whether the customer will still need it in one year, five or even ten years to come. This will help you to have a rough measure of practicality of the idea. After having a rough plan for the idea, take your time to research and learn on skills to develop your product, your target customers, and the market trends based on your potential product.
The more knowledge you have about the market, your potential customers and your competitors will give you a higher chance of succeeding in the venture. It is also important to inject your initial capital slowly, gauging the performance of the product in the market and improve the product to suit customers’ need before starting mass production. This gives you a chance to change in case of a miss in the market.
Important Pre-Launch Guidelines for Startups
Statistics shows that most startups fail in less than a year. This is due to lack of proper planning before launching the new business and the anticipation of making profits early. You should also focus on other reasons for startup failure. Here are 4 strategies that you can employ before launching your product to increase your chances of success and growth:
1. Gathering The Right Audience
Building a list of your potential customer is one of the most essential steps towards growth. You can set up a landing page that is designed to prompt visitors to leave their emails in exchange for helpful tips, or the first come discount approach. You should also engage your potential customers on social media platforms and direct them to your landing page. Growth hacking process for any business involves attracting, engaging, acquiring and maintaining your customer. When you have a solid mailing list, you have potential customers who are ready to test or even buy your product.
2. Do Not Focus On Perfection
Many startups invest all their time and energy in trying to perfect their product in order to beat the competitor. There is no end to perfection, instead of focusing on meeting the market needs and growing the business, you may spend your lifetime adding features to your product and end up failing in business. The best way to start is to build a minimum viable product, offer it to volunteer customers, and improve the product based on the feedback. This will help you to understand the market and its demand at the same time market your product.
3. Use Of Blogs and Websites
You can prove the value of your product by writing content about the product and engage your customers through blogs. Setting up a blog is simple and free, and will give you an opportunity to address you customers’ concerns and attract more visitors. You can also hire expert mobile application development company to design & develop a professional website that will have an interface that allows you to chat with your customers in case they have queries or complements.
4. Understanding the Market Trends
Market research is very important for any new business. There are many affordable resources that can come in handy in conducting a wide-ranging market research. Such tools will help you to understand your set of customers and their behavior, so that you can offer sets of products that directly address their needs. A comprehensive market research should guide your minimum viable product (MVP) for each set of your customers.
The Lean Startup methodology
The methodology employs iterative product release and validates learning with an aim of getting the desired product to the customers faster. The approach starts with developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to address an identified market need. This is followed by measurement and learning of how well the product is solving the identified problem in the market.
From the customer feedback, you will know whether the product is fit for the market, whether you need to change the product completely or add some features to the product to address the newly learnt demands. The whole idea is based on build-measure-learn cycle that focuses on product development and involves first building MVP of the idea, testing the market effectiveness and learning from practical experiments to refine products, so as to reach the market fit mark.
