Start-up

• Small-to-mid-sized business start-up: Are those that don’t intend to grow over about 2,000 employees.
• Social start-up: Work to make a difference in a community and positively contribute to a social cause endeavour of some kind.
• Large business start-up: Include companies that are meant to innovate and make substantial waves in their industry.
• Scalable start-up: Are businesses that are formed to scale up in size (grow immensely) over time.
• Acquirable/buyable start-up: Include businesses that are created with the intention of being bought at some point.
• Lifestyle start-up: Are created with the intention of focusing on the behaviours and activities (or the “lifestyle”) that the founders — and their target audience — are passionate about.

Here are a few guidelines for how to launch a start-up that’s poised for growth, profit and success:

How to Launch a Successful Start-up Business

1. Set up your start-up

The first step to launching a successful start-up business requires you to create a strong foundation – this is critical to your ability to grow and scale your business effectively.

Then, consider various factors like your strategy, budget, and legal structure, and more. Once you have set up your start-up appropriately, it’s time to validate the product or service you want to sell.

2. Conduct market research for your product or service

Market research is a must when it comes to building a start-up. It’s invaluable for multiple reasons:

• Define and engage your target audience to learn more about how you can better solve their problems.
• Analyze your competition, research their product or service, pricing structure, messaging, and unique selling proposition (USP) to better understand how you can set your business apart.
• Formulate your positioning statement for your product and your brand.
• Fuel your go-to-market strategy to outline precisely how you’ll present your product or service to your intended market.

3. Obtain start-up funding

There are a few ways to raise money for your start-up:

• Incubator Funding: Incubators help start-ups accelerate their growth through support for management training, office space, capital, mentorship, and networking connections.Incubators can be sponsored by a variety of organizations: for-profit ventures, non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and even community and economic development organizations.
• Venture Capital Funding: Venture capital (VC) is private equity (money) given to start-ups who show high, long-term growth potential. This money is provided by venture capitalists that spearhead these specialized firms or funds.
• Crowdfunding: Crowdfunding refers to raising money from your future customers and fans. It’s a great way to gain equity without giving away ownership, although crowdfunding doesn’t offer the same level of mentorship and education as incubators or venture capitalists do.

Crowdfunding is also valuable for more than raising money. Crowdfunding increases awareness around your brand and product, markets your brand to a new audience, and inherently validates your product or service ideas.

4. Grow your customer base.

Start-ups scale fast because they 1) target the right customers and 2) continually work to grow their customer base.

Start-ups can grow organically which is achieved by internal initiatives versus external funding and/or acquisitions. Some examples of organic growth include content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), PR, paid advertising, and email marketing.

Growth can also be achieved by growth hacking, a fancy term for using creative, innovative, low-cost strategies to help achieve exponential user growth.

Common Start-up Struggles

1. Product Management Struggles

When designing and selling a product, it’s good practice to listen to your customers and continue improving on the product. But, have you ever thought about when to stop?

This leads to ongoing, excessive expansion of a product or the continual addition of new features. While improvement is a good thing, non-stop improvement can be a drain on resources and eventually become unhealthy. Hence you have to ensure to stop and focus on maintaining a best product in its category.

2. Money Management Struggles

Lots of start-ups fail because they 1) can’t bring in money, 2) spend their money on the wrong things, 3) manage their money all wrong or 4) all of the above.

While it cannot be advised on how to fix all of these problems (as that will depend on your specific start-up and expenses), but here are a few helpful tools for managing your money better:

Operating income formula calculates your start-up’s profitability. Profitability is a major indicator of success and potential future success.

Burn rate shows you how fast you spend money before you reach profitability. A correctly calculated burn rate can be responsible for growth, planning, and future success.

Debt-to-equity ratio shows how exactly your capital has been raised. This number tells lenders and investors how financially stable or risky your business might be.

Working capital calculates how much money you have left to pay off short-term debts. This indicates the current financial health of your business.

Cash flow tells you how much money you have coming in and out of your business. It shows exactly where cash is coming from and how it’s being spent.

Use these tools and formulas to evaluate and improve the financial health of your start-up.

3. Growth Management Struggles

There are host of start-up founders who’ve been successful — Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, just to name a few.

In the start-up world, it’s easy to compare. It’s also easy to change our decision-making and problem-solving processes when we hear what worked for others. But when we blindly focus on start-up success stories — and forget about the numerous failures — we risk learning the valuable lessons that those failures could teach us.

This is called survivorship bias, and many start-ups struggle with it. As you grow your start-up, it’s important to learn from successes and failures.

To avoid survivorship bias and grow your start-up on your terms, focus on what’s ahead of you, and do your best to not compare to other founders or start-up businesses. If you have a pressing question, try to seek answers from successes and failures alike — there will be valuable lessons available from both.

Reference/Citation/Source

• The Ultimate Guide to Startups
  https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/startups