It took me only 18 months before I was able to completely come up with these tips. A lot of them I have had to learn from my own experiences while some I learned from talking to prominent men and women in the industry. I have also been a big reader in the last year, going cover to cover on several books on start ups, entrepreneurship, auto biographies and websites. All these lessons I have come across have culminated in these tips I am sharing today.
While I am labeling these tips as important, they are not the only things to take into consideration while pursuing glory for your start up. As one lives life and grows older, it’s essential to keep learning and picking up other ideas. Anyway, here are those tips briefly:
Be confident in yourself and your product: Now this is perhaps the most important tip on here. You’ve got to be terribly confident in what you have and what you are capable of doing provided it’s actually good. In this industry, it’s not uncommon to receive tones of negative response before you even get a “this might be a decent idea, send me more detail about your marketing plan and financials”. You cannot afford to let all the negative review get to you and bring you down from your high. Never take these things personal, just have belief in yourself and keep pressing forward.
Surround yourself with good people: The people you surround yourself with I have found are to your company’s growth as foundation is to a house holding up. A bad foundation will lead to the house’s demise and so if you fail to work with smart and trustworthy people, it is only a matter of time before your startup fails. I can’t tell you how many founders I have talked to who claim their business failed for this reason. Apparently it is the second most popular reason for failure these days. When I say people around you, I am talking about your cofounder, your mentor, your advisor, you employees if you have any and those funding you.
Launching is only the beginning: When I launched my first business ( a social community), I thought I had arrived, I thought I had done the most important thing and now, I just had to sit back, manage the site and have the money start rolling in. I was wrong, terribly wrong actually! I learned and did a lot more after I had launched than before I did. I will give you an example, I didn’t realize how easy it was for spammers to get into a social network with a chat room to get on and take over kind of like what yahoo chat has been reduced to. I tried everything I could to reduce this or even better, completely annihilate it…yes I failed! I eventually had to pull the plug on that website since its purpose was strictly for educational conversation. I learned so much more and evolved a lot more after the website was live though than before it did and I have no regrets in this case. It only made me more enlightened and vast in my trade.
Your customers (users) are people, treat them well: I can’t stress the importance of this point any more than I keep doing. If your product is good, your customers are happy and believe me as long as your customers are happy, they will always come back and bring other people along. Always give your customers a reason to be happy, treat it as a relationship. I had the opportunity to talk to a serial entrepreneur on a trip I took to New York in February and lessons I learned in the 3 minutes I spent keeping quiet as he gladly dished on reasons for his success can’t be traded for anything. “I always make sure my customers are happy before I satisfy myself “he said. “I found that at the start I didn’t gain much satisfaction but as I built a fan base and customers came pouring in, my satisfaction jumped. It took the same thing to make these people happy yet returns increased so profit went sky high. People kept recommending my online rentnotice software and services to their friends and families and the spiral effect went on and on”. I will cover the importance of effective customer satisfaction elaborately in my first e-book.
You can grow as much as you want: There really is no limit to how much your venture can grow. As long as your product is good, you can blow up so much that sometimes you’ll sit and reconsider if you want/can handle all these customers. Mark Zuckerberg of facebook once spoke of his initial thoughts and idea for facebook. It was supposed to be an IVY- league thing, then it became a social network for American universities, then the UK, then highschools joined and you know the rest. In essence, keep in the back of your mind that there’s no limit to your success, just work hard, deliver a top product and build your fan base…a people connection.
You don’t need venture money, not at first anyway: A lot of young entrepreneurs have a plan, they write their plan and modus operandi on a piece of paper, send it in to investors and expect them to slap money on their desk. Well sorry to disappoint, doesn’t work like that. But it’s okay, you don’t need that money anyway. It is always advisable to start off small in order to build a resume and connections first before going big and speaking to professional investors. If you however still need a bit of money, the options available to you are: family & friends, work and save up, Angels, Y- combinator. Read my guide to funding startups here
FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS: Always keep your startup a priority in your life and your blackberry. Give it your full attention and ensure that other things are only secondary at best to it. I understand that as a young entrepreneur, it will be hard to focus on that one thing as you have a million other concerns like school, sports e.t.c. but it is vital to train yourself and adjust accordingly. Nothing kills a startup like a lackadaisical attitude so give it your best effort, keep your head up…there will be many bumps on the road but soldier on until you achieve your dream.
