how to start a business

7 Tips for Starting A Business

In one of the  LinkedIn group, people were discussing passionately why sometimes start up businesses  fail. It's an interesting discussion and some of the tips are applicable to products as well as service companies.

Best Tips for Start Up Business

In this article I will briefly address the question: “What are the key factors for successfully starting a business?”

7 tips on how to create a new business

1. Continue to innovate - If you’ve attained a measure of success, you must continue to innovate your products, services and your marketing just to maintain your position. You can bet the competition is innovating aggressively, and they’ll pass you by in three seconds if you stop doing the things that brought you success.

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You should ensure that there is a good demand for your products & services. Once you identify the demand, you need to innovate to create uniqueness of your product & services.

There were search engines long before Google created one,  but their version brings uniqueness in internet searching by using page rank & link concepts. Because of this business philosophy, Google is a number 1 company.

Don’t spend all your money to get behind an innovation. You need to spend money slowly to encourage a culture of cheapness. This is most one of the most important tips for how to run a business

Here is a video on how to start up a business & business planning

2. Know your customer - You should identify your target markets, because marketing towards corporate and mass are not equal. You should know what your customer wants. Your customer segmentation strategy should be very clear because you might be competing against several established companies. You should take advantage of sophisticated analytic tools for psychographic segmentation.

Once again, Google earned revenue from advertisers but they assign higher priority to users. Follow their example, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don't put users first, you leave a gap for competitors to do so.


3. Set the marketing tone - This needs to be done by the CEO of your company. Examples are Apple. Amazon, Microsoft, Qualcomm. This is very important to run a business and it’s very important to create a strong brand.

4. Use social media to keep talking with your customers. Send them newsletter or arrange poll and give some free gifts, etc. Use the latest tools for b2b social media or market through social media. But, always check ROI first before using any tool.

5. Focus on strengths - If a telecom company has a strong technological skill they should use it to differentiate them from their competitors because this is their identity. SAS is another example from product companies.

6. Hire a technical manager and excellent techl people for a tech company. Be agile in your approach, because today there is no ‘six months for planning’.

Have you checked the qualifications of the founders on the top 400 companies at Forbes? Most of them are technical people.

Remember, professors are not doing the most innovative and game changing work. So, MBAs who learned from them might not fit for your game plan. You need people who have fire in their belly.

Try to include people with exposure to development, design, marketing, fund raising, and more. See if you can find people with prior experience in other startup companies, especially with experience in how to get start up business loans. In these cases, previous experience matters.

One more thing, if you are a startup, you should look for grad students, not law firms. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive.


7. Make great products for a viable market (i.e. a unique solution to urgent market requirement) - I think this is the single most important reason why start-ups, fail but as I kept reading that LinkedIn discussion, it seemed to me that people often believe companies make great products, but they fail due to of the above mentioned reasons.

In summary on steps on how to start a business, while follow your passion stop jumping to next new shiny objects.

• Make sure that if your passion is to start a business, you research how to do it properly and not flit to each new shiny thing.
• You business should address the solve the problems of poor people who are leaving below poverty line. You have huge volume so you can work with thin margin.
• Think for new disruptive innovation live Cover apps. Cover has launched out of beta with an iOS app that lets restaurant goers in New York City easily pay for their meals without having to wait for the check. Cover just brings the convenience to customers.

Be honest so that you can build trust with your employees & customers. While it is good to be a "learn it all" rather than "know it all” type, you should have a team that clearly understands the regulatory requirements.

Most Important Tip   Start working with negative working capital.. This means gets the money first from customer and deliver later within agreed SLA. This is the secret of several successful start ups.

About author: Charles is a digital media and technology professional who has invested and across a range of seed stages, private venture-backed and publicly traded technology companies.He is a start up business consultant. He did B.Com & LLB from Mumbai University and post-graduation in Economics from London. He also has worked with large companies for last 20 years. He started his consultancy firm in 2007 in Minnesota.  Click the link to read this latest business article on  mobile apps for business.

Here is a great article by Tiffany on How To Work From Home as a self entrepreneur.

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