Of late it has become a trend for many people to dream about starting their own firm. With the growing start-up culture, it is now assumed that being a start-up founder is a new cool! Especially many college kids these days want to have their own start-up and most often right after their graduation or even before. While there are many success stories, there are also many out there who are stuck with the question – How can I start my start-up?
How can you start your startup?
There can be many ways you can start your venture. Here is my take on a compilation on some steps which you can take to launch your company:
1. Ideate:
First thing is to crystallize the idea in a paper as to what is the core concept of the idea. What is the problem you are solving? Are you passionate about it? Does it consume you?
2. Research:
Do some reading/ searching on the internet if there are similar companies out there.
3. Value Proposition:
Refine your idea and see if there a distinct value proposition you can come up with.
4. Feedback:
Bounce this problem you are solving with few trusted and successful people. This is very important. Sometimes we fear that somebody else can steal the idea, and we don’t share, but that just prevents us from getting valuable feedback. We might think this is a cool idea, but it may not be cool
and just bouncing off of different minds gives us great insight into our mind itself.
5. Ruminate:
Sleepover it for a week and then revisit the idea, refine it to an extent that you feel this idea consumes you completely. Love vs infatuation… get the drift?
6. Groundwork:
Think about idea scalability and longevity, sell-ability, will somebody fund you? What demographics, geography you will be targeting? Price point?
7. Partner:
Find a co-founder if you feel that you would need another angle to your startup.
8. Minimally Viable Product (MVP):
Think about MVP (Minimally viable product) and work on launching a beta version (kind of internal release). This may not have all the features, but you can get amazing feedback from clients.
9. Launch, iterate and grow:
10. Persevere:
Fight hard and be ready to fail. Sounds funny, but that’s the trick. Increase your failure rate to increase your success rate.
It could be during any phase after you have refined your idea to pitch to VCs to secure funding which would a very critical piece to sustain your startup.
