“A hiker wearing a backpack, standing on a hill looking out at the mountains and clouds during sunrise” by Aneta Ivanova on Unsplash
“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”
— Thomas Edison, General Electric Co-founder
Startups are the new cool and it is almost everybody’s dream to become an entrepreneur. However, most aspiring entrepreneurs never get to build a successful startup. Here are the 5 simple steps that you can take to increase your chances of building a successful startup:
1. Find a Problem That People Would Pay For
The most common pitfall for aspiring entrepreneurs is creating a solution before identifying a problem that people have.
It is very tempting to jump on the idea you have, but most people fail here due to not having a big enough market.
Is it something that a society (or even a neighborhood) needs? Is it something you can do? Are you passionate about doing it?
Those are the questions that you should ask yourself before anything else.
The ideal business idea would be something that ticks all the boxes. If you are working hard to fulfill a need but if you hate doing that, you will just end up resenting and quitting before you see the fruit of your labor.
Likewise, if you are working on things you are passionate about, but there is no market for it, you won’t be able to generate enough revenue or sales. Even if you have a passion and a market for your business idea, if you do not have the ability to execute it, you will just fail with your operations.
I would suggest you to write down any idea that you have without evaluating it at first. After you have a list of ideas, just trim it down using the questions above and find the problem that you are passionate about solving, that you are best suited to solve, and that has a significant market.
2. Validate Your Ideas
Nobody is going to steal your ideas. Ideas are worthless without proper execution. Besides, if you are planning to build a business around your idea, you need to start in the real world with real people, not in an imaginary one.
To validate your business idea, you should be going out and talking to people who might be interested in using your products. Many people make the mistake at this step by only talking to those who they are close to.
It’s natural to be excited and passionate about your business idea, and to think it has little to no flaws, which is why more often than not we talk to our friends and family about it, knowing that they would embrace it exactly like we would. However, in most cases, their feedback will be biased and they might not even be our potential customers.
You should carefully choose your interviewees. They should be your potential clients, they should be someone who fits the profile of your ideal customer. Conduct 10 to 15-minute informal interviews with them and get as much honest feedback as you can. Lastly, review all your feedback and decide how you should implement your business idea.
3. Build a Winning Team
If you are going to build a successful startup, you will need a great core team. They should be people who share the same passion, and who will stand by you through all the ups and downs of your startup journey.
At some point, all startups will inevitably face a setback and a good team will support you through the test of time.
You should find people who will complement your competencies and skills. As human beings, we tend to stay with people who we can trust and have known for a while.
However, most of the time, they are not the people who would complement our skill-sets. You should go and find people who are smarter than you, especially from a different field of expertise than you are.
It is believed that the startup dream team consists of a Hacker, a Hustler and a Hipster. The hacker, with his/her knowledge of coding, will turn the new idea into reality while the hustler will take care of business dealings and get traction. The hipster, on the other hand, with his/her flair for creativity, will make sure the final product is way cooler than any other product on the market.
However, getting a co-founder is like getting married. Know your partner well before the professional tie-up. To avoid any clashes later on, it is best to make sure that you guys share the long-term compatibility.
4. Learn From People Who Have Gone Through a Similar Journey
Another step in building a successful startup is having a mentor who will help you through the ups and downs of your startup journey. However, most aspiring entrepreneurs do not look for mentors as hard as they do for co-founders.
According to the SBA, 70% of mentored business survived past the fifth year, while 50% failed to get past their fifth year.
Having a mentor will be hugely beneficial for your startup as they have already been there and done that. You will be able to learn from your mentor things that are never shared in books, and their expertise and experience will help you overcome whenever you face a wall.
In addition, angel investors and VCs tend to invest in people who were introduced by someone they trust. Mentors have a vast network of friends who can greatly benefit your business.
Self-confidence is highly important and necessary for startup founders and having someone who will guide you and share your worries will have positive mental effects on the founders.
5. Build — Measure — Learn
Most startups have to work with limited resources. Henceforth, money and time are luxuries that a startup founder can’t afford. So startups need to fail fast, learn fast and success fast.
In order to do that, you will need to get your product out as fast as possible. Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and shipping it to your potential customers is the fastest way to receive valuable feedback and learn from that.
MVP is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development. The goal of MVP is to maximize learning, not to develop fully-featured prototype of the product.
The Build-Measure-Learn method helps startups be fast, agile and efficient. One of the components of Build-Measure-Learn is having a hypothesis and pushing out MVP to test those hypotheses. Before you push out your MVP, it is important to identify measurable metrics that will help you test your hypotheses.
As startups, you need to complete the circle as many times as possible in a short frame of time. You will need to push out MVP, test hypotheses and incorporate those feedbacks for your future product development as much as possible.
Those are the 5 small steps that aspiring entrepreneurs should take while building a startup. The startup journey is long and tough, but it is not impossible. Keep working hard and be persistent, even if you face hurdles.
The article is first published on medium by myself here.