Over the last few years, we’ve seen and heard amazing startup success stories, which led many to think that launching and running a cutting-edge company isn’t such a big deal.
The current economy is undergoing a slow process of recovery and starting a small business with high hopes can easily lead to dissatisfaction and disappointment. Running a successful startup requires passion, market knowledge, flexibility, creative thinking and the ability to drive innovation.
Here are top 20 tips for developing and ensuring a successful future of a startup.
1. Make a Difference
If you enter the business with the sole aim of making money, you probably won’t succeed in achieving your shallow goal. Always try to improve your product to offer a something of a long-lasting value. If your aim is to make a real difference, success will eventually find you.
2. Believe in Your Product
When starting and running a business, you should always follow your vision – not the one of the VC, no matter how fat the offered paycheck is. If your startup loses the sight of your vision, the world will follow suit and your product will become completely irrelevant.
3. Research Your Market
In order to succeed, you’ll need to make something that people actually want. If your product doesn’t have a target audience, it will eventually fail. That’s why it’s important to first research your market – ask people for their opinion on your product and change it accordingly so it meets people’s needs or expectations. Don’t assume what others want – find out and deliver the experience.
4. Set Up a Budget
Creatives who have great ideas sometimes find it hard to discuss their projects from a financial point of view. In order to have a clear idea about how much it will take to run your company, you’ll need to prepare an accurate budget. Underestimate your revenues and overestimate your expenses. And always maintain a small financial cushion for extra spending.
5. Have a Moment of Self-Reflection
After launching and surviving the initial few months of running your business, find a moment to reflect on what kind of investment that would allow your company to grow. Should it be infrastructure, technology, engineering or maybe a new facility? Once you establish that, you’re ready to talk to potential investors.
6. Search Funding
Big businesses are actually very rarely self-founded. In order to grow, you’ll need to know exactly what kind of capital is required to expand your company. Having someone who is smart and finance-oriented by your side can help out. This person can spot potential growth in certain areas of your business that you might have not noticed.
7. Think Big
When developing and improving your product, make sure that it can compete globally – on any market and against any competition. That doesn’t mean you need to expand your business globally. It’s all about delivering the best product and offering it where you find considerable demand and low competition.
8. Hire the Right People
People are the heart of every business. Hiring the right individuals will make it much easier to manage them efficiently and motivate them to achieve the best results possible. After all, their job is to contribute to the success of your startup, so why not hire people who are actually passionate about your vision?
9. Empower Your Employees
In order to further motivate your employees in reaching set goals and expanding the company, you’ll need to empower them. In this context, sharing will help to increase passion and collective responsibility for everything that happens to the startup. Ultimately, it’s about sharing a vision – if you manage that, you’ll be unbeatable.
10. And Invest in Them
Finally, you should always find ways to invest in your employees. Offer various forms of training and help them grow – it’s in your best interest too.
11. Don’t Save Up on Marketing
The wonders of the web might convince you that a marketing strategy is an unnecessary cost. After all, you can manage your social media channels just fine, but the reality of the business will soon verify this belief. A marketing budget is indispensable for keeping the business alive. Don’t save up on it and allocate at least 5 percent of the projected annual revenues for this purpose. Remember that this is just a rule of thumb and marketing budgets should always be tailored to fit the requirements of the business in question.
12. Keep Tabs on Your Cash
Money is the lifeblood of every business, so make sure your startup has enough cash-flow to keep things running. Companies sometimes fail because they grow too fast and and use all their cash. A certain level of liquidity is a must for running a successful startup.
13. Be Flexible
Don’t ever lose your vision, but be prepared to shift your focus. Being innovative means the ability of adjusting to rapidly changing conditions – flexibility is key to making the most from today’s economy, which is all about the moment.
14. Diversify
If you find a big customer, don’t just settle. Always look for ways of expanding your line to others. There’s no guarantee your big client is going to be here forever.
15. Be Confident, But Humble
As a manager, you should be confident, but open-minded. Don’t jump into thinking that you’re the one who knows the solution to every problem. Listen to your clients and be ready to learn from whatever insights they offer you. As a founder, have confidence in your vision and your product because if you don’t, no one will.
16. Don’t Be Afraid to Scale
In order to help your business grow, you’ll need to know how to scale it. A lot of companies don’t and get stuck in a certain revenue range. If you feel ready to scale, have a look around for potential financing options. Network, talk to people, and establish relationships. They can all open your eyes about expanding and growing your business.
17. Be Transparent
When it comes to running a startup, transparency is important. If you’re trying to hide some internal problems, better solve them and tell people how you overcame this particular challenge, instead of hiding your problems from the world.
18. Compete
To lead your startup to success, you’ll need to toughen up and be prepared to compete with big companies. Don’t be afraid of taking your share of the market – go after a big part of it, not just a small slice.
19. Test, Test, Test
Never market a product without testing it first. Don’t be afraid to prototype and do it early in the process and often enough to get the full picture. Prototyping will answer all your potential questions and highlight things you never knew could be important.
20. And Finally, Stop Waiting, Just Do It
If you feel you’ve got the right idea that can rock the world, just go for it – plan, evaluate, test and get your product out there. If you don’t, someone else might simply steal your moment.