Focus Your Startup Philosophy On What You Do Well

By David Thompson

May 20, 2022 05:12 PM EDT

Focus Your Startup Philosophy On What You Do Well(Tingey Injury Law Firm via Unsplash) (Credit: Getty Image)

The number of startups has accelerated in the past few years, and the reasons for that jump can be led back to a few different factors.

The disruption that the pandemic caused to work, school, and societies as a whole only accelerated the detachment people were feeling and the disruption to the traditional modes of behavior.

For example, before 2020, less than 20% of the global workforce had some remote or hybrid type work available.

Since the pandemic, that has risen to over 25% and climbing, with over 80% of workers expecting to remain at home for work for 3-days or more.

Unfortunately, with the demand rising for remote work, 40% of employers shut down the idea.

That negative response from employers is another factor that people have a disillusioned outlook on traditional business approaches and may help explain one of the factors for the surging trend of entrepreneurship.

Think about it. In the blink of an eye, we were all told to stay home. As a result, a vast majority of people lost their jobs through no fault of their own.

That realization that as a worker, you as a person were expendable caused many people to reconsider their work situations. Many looked at creating their own startups as a result.

Setting Up Your Startup For Success

There's a blueprint to startup success, and no, it's not getting large amounts of seed money or angel investment. Granted, certain startups will require more equity to get launched than others.

However, the blueprint for success as a startup includes creating a business plan, determining your legal entity status, creating a lead generation and customer acquisition plan, marketing your business, selling your products, analyzing the data, and iterating prior to finding funding.

Create A Business Plan: Your business plan should define who you are, what you offer, how you plan to grow, and what the costs are to make those things happen.

Your plan should analyze the market conditions, write an organization chart, explain your product and services, the logistics of fulfilling your sales and marketing targets, define sales strategies, and detail the financials.

Determine Your Legal Entity: This step is crucial in being a legitimate business. Determining if you'll operate as a sole-proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or LLC (limited liability company) will allow you to understand the tax implications and benefits your business will have in relation to the IRS and local tax bureaus.

Lead Generation And Customer Acquisition Strategies: Who do you plan to sell to, how are you going to find them, and what will you do to continue growing is what you need to address at this stage.

Before launching, you may want to consider sales analytics software to help you analyze and focus your energies on the areas that will be successful.

How Will You Fulfill Your Sales: Do you plan to ship directly to your customers, outsource, or use a fulfillment service? Having the little details figured out will save you time, money, and headaches once you make your first sales.

Iterating: Too often, companies launch and stubbornly hold onto a losing product or service, costing them time and positioning in the marketplace for those products they have that perform well.

It's better to analyze what is working and capitalize on that thing than trying to sell a wider variety of items. Think about the history of Coca-Cola. They spent decades focused on selling their ubiquitous drink before spinning off into other markets and products.

Don't Rediscover Fire Or Recreate The Wheel

There are plenty of startup ideas that you can pursue that don't require you to do some sort of magical thinking in creating the next unicorn.

Instead, look at market needs in areas where things are already growing. Case in point, if you're interested in Software as a Service (SaaS), that's been done so many times before and probably better (no offense).

Rather than put out a ho-hum business, figure out a niche or variation of SaaS-type businesses.

A case in point is working in software but providing security and two-step security identification. You could consider one area in the VaaS sphere, or Voice as a Service, an innovative way to use voice recognition software as a security protocol.

Creating a startup isn't complicated but setting it up to perform well, grow over time, and become sustainable takes a lot of planning.

Having said that, don't wait to launch as perfection becomes the enemy of the good, meaning the longer you try to make your startup launch perfect, the further you get from your first and continuing sale.

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