How To Launch Your Startup Faster
Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?
Everyone has creative ideas but not all could get it launch off the ground successfully. Major reason behind it is many entrepreneurs don’t know how to reach from a brilliant idea to a secure, well established and money-making business.
For those of you who have never started a business before, it can sound like an intimidating task. It will take hard work, dedication, money, some sleepless nights, and even some failure before you succeed. Once you take your business off the ground, you need to work just as hard to keep it going every year.
This article will help you to learn how to plan your startup development and avoid critical mistakes.
Plan Your Business
A proper business plan gives you a significant advantage. Outline the first 3 to 5 years of your business strategy.
The document should reflect project philosophy, market research results, prior goals and project milestones, general development timelines, and detailed budget. It should also describe the monetisation model of an app, project team structure, and an app’s promotional plan. A Business plan also helps you to attract potential investors.
Following are the key points you must include in your plan:
- List your key business objectives and goals. Describe your idea and the way you see the social impact of your startup.
- Provide information on the expert team, its structure and the style it is going to work on the project.
- Study market trends and measure your chances to obtain your niche.
- Explain how your product works and why it is so valuable for the target audience.
- Give an overview of your marketing strategy.
- Outline funding requirements and clarify how much money you need in 6 months, one year, and several years.
Hiring People
How many people do you need? What roles to assign them? You need people in every section of your company. For example if you are starting a restaurant business, you will need workers from servers to managers. So you need to find appropriate people and distribute tasks efficiently among them.
Hire on contract basis, especially in the beginning stages of your business. This way you can get best from your talented employees. Also, be willing to hire remote workers to get the work done.
Find A Cofounder
Most of the successful startups are formed by a team, not an individual founder. Select your partner who has an expertise in different field than yours. So that you don’t have to do everything by yourself. Select your cofounder who has good soft skills. Good communication skills are important in industrial relations.
A good partner can provide you with necessary amount of expertise, experience and knowledge in your market niche. And help you to save money on management and marketing.
But knowledge and communicative skills don’t mean a thing if your partner is lacking self-control or doesn’t have any motivation to participate in the working process actively. Find someone who is dedicated and ready to push himself/herself upto their potentials for your project.
Find A Startup Capital
Money is the way to get additional resources such as professional expertise or hard- and software, reach potential users by purchasing promotional campaign and rent an office to speed up and control startup processes.
Plan your startup budget carefully. Create a detailed financial plan and projections that will cover different periods including the next 5 and even 10 years. It will help to prove that you’ve got a serious attitude to your project for investors.
Some sources to get funding for your business:
- Personal Funds: Collecting money to start your business can postpone the launch day and can kill a startup at the beginning. Personal funds give your business independence. So have some savings for your business.
- Bank Loans: It is the fastest and the easiest way to provide yourself with the necessary capital. But you have to give more money back. Also, you need to present a clear business plan for bank managers.
- Family and Friends: The biggest advantage of relatives-and-friends funding is less strong terms of giving the money back. But there can be possibility of situations which can spoil your relations.
- Online lenders: Online lenders provide you with a sort of bank loan using their capital, but it is their banks that support the investing process, take care of the contracts and other documents, and extort compensation from the borrower if he or she doesn’t comply with the terms of the contract.
Find a Perfect Name
Naming is a part of marketing. Moreover, that is the point where marketing begins.
- Research on what your potential customers like and dislike, find out what gives them emotional pleasure and relief. Try to enrich your name ideas with appropriate positive associations.
- Restrict the length of the name upto 30 characters. Short names with 1–3 syllables are easy to say, which means that people will share information on your project more often.
- A name is the first thing potential users hear about you. It should help them understand what is the idea, mission, and style of your product. However, don’t make it too straight forward as it would limit your commercial flexibility.
- If your domain name is taken, it will be difficult for you to get traffic and convert visitors to downloaders. And if an application with the same name already exists, you simply cannot add your product to App Store or Play Market catalog. So first research properly on domain names.
Become A Marketing Expert
You might have the best product or service in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then your startup can’t succeed.
You have to learn digital marketing strategies to reach out to maximum audience.
Digital marketing can be one of less expensive approaches which includes:
- Content marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
Marketing needs to be a top priority for your startup company. Even if your startup hasn’t launched yet, it’s never too early to start marketing.
Launching your startup business won’t be perfect, and you need to prepare for unforeseen circumstances. Proper planning and execution will help limit these hurdles.
Happy planning!