Starting a Startup

A FRIENDLY NOTE TO ALL THE BUDDING ENTREPRENEURS:

The first step towards launching a startup is creating a detailed plan for your business. For this, you need to understand the market and plan for your start up’s initial documentation ranging from finance, legal, human resource, administration, and other business-related hurdles. Setting up your own company is not limited to just launching your website and setting up an office space; the devil lies in the details of planning to launch.

Does timing play a role in success?
For a startup, timing is an integral part of the puzzle. For, if you are too early, you perish, and if are a late entrant, you may not survive. Hence, efficient planning requires a structured approach for starting a startup.

Highlighted below are a few critical steps that you should consider to launch a business successfully:

1. Need Assessment

Articulate a sound problem statement that identifies a market need which your idea can solve;this helps build a comprehensive product/ service to efficiently address the identified problem.

2. Is there any market solution to the identified problem?

Before jumping into developing your idea, study the market and the solutions available. Are there any existing alternatives? How are they doing? What is your target customer persona? This research will help you understand the market you plan to enter and will help you identify the existing need gap.Thereby creating a targeted product development and market entry strategy.

3. Are you a disruptor?

If the identified problem has not been addressed yet then highlight the USP of your solution. Talk to industry experts and consultants to validate the idea and incorporate their inputs. What do they have to say about the solution? Maybe someone has already tried and failed. What were the learnings? Can these benefit you in structuring your solution and the approach to the market?

4. Develop the concept

Always keep the high-level concept of the solution handy to talk to the potential customers and take their inputs on how they feel about the solution. Here your storytelling skills will be tested; you need to explain the entire idea to the sample target group to get a comprehensive feedback. This is an ongoing cycle that will help refine the solution. Conduct a dipstick study to check the viability of your idea. Based on this, create a prototype to get feedback from the sample TG using a structured survey form.

5. Minimum Viable Product

The above steps will help you to create the prototype. This is also called the minimum viable product, ‘the simplest version of the product’, which is used to do beta testing with your sample customer group. This step helps to gather feedback on the functionality and usability of the intended solution. Multiple product iterations would make it a sellable solution in the target market.

In this step, create a product roadmap with clear timelines to bring in structure to the product life cycle.

6. Create a Business Model and a Financial Model

A business model can be defined as, “The manner by which the business enterprise delivers value to customers, entices customers to pay for value, and converts those payments to profit” – David Teece.

Now that the MVP is ready, you need to create your business model and financial model (Costs, Revenues, & Profits) to understand the idea’s economic viability.

7. Funding

Once you have created the business and financial model, the next step is to look at the company’s financial fitness. Based on the business plan and revenue projections, you will calculate your company’s burn rate. You would then have to decide how much money you will need to successfully run the company till the company breaks even. Proceeding this, you could opt for bootstrapped operations or gotowards the initial seed round of fundraising through a VC.

This is where the startup journey starts. There are a few more steps that you would need to undertake to raise funds from VCs: like preparing a business strategy, product strategy, go-to-market strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy, strong pitch deck and business plan.

Starting a startup is a long adventurous journey with lots of ups & downs and twists & turns, and you need an excellent guiding hand to help you through it all.

At TTF Consultants, we work with startups to create the 360◦ of go-to-market strategy, creating a unique brand identity and brand promise, which will eventually lead to better customer conversion.

In case of any queries, you can connect with us oncontact@ttfconsultants.com