5 ways to kickstart a start-up

Pradeep Shukla

To become a successful entrepreneur, one needs to have a foolproof start-up strategy.  Besides a great idea and a business plan in place, there are several other factors that make a start-up boom. For instance, you need to raise the required capital for your new business, which can either be from your personal savings or from investors. 

Steve Jobs rightly said, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Most successful entrepreneurs follow a rule to turn their venture into a business with potential. It is to begin a start-up backwards.

Let us look at the five ways which can help turn your dream come true.

Begin with a plan: Not all businesses run from home need a professional business plan. But business owners must spend some time to plan. Before you invest your money, sit down and determine how much investment is required, your goals, both short and long term, your marketing plan and all those pesky details. When starting a new venture in an emerging market and with an untested model, it's important to keep costs as close to zero as possible. Manage your finances smartly. Instead of hiring developers or bringing on a technical co-founder, the entire system and workflow should be built in Google Docs. 

Use cost-effective tools: A number of tools, which assist you in achieving the best possible results with minimum expenditure, are available. These give you a reality check about the viability of your business ideas. You do not have to use your scarce money and resources in employing experts to complete the same task.

Improve business model over time: Experts in the field of financial services should guide you as to how to invest in sales and marketing efforts to better your business graph with time.  

Identify the customers’ needs: Understand how your business can satisfy your customers better than your existing competitors and know the competitive advantages of your business, which distinguish you from the rest. Most companies just guess about the type of products or services their customers wish for. This is why many start-ups fail, as they do not understand their customers’ needs and make wild guesses. 

Speak to your clients: When you have recognised your ideal consumers, you have two options — either you can speculate about the services or products they want or you can just go and talk to them about what type of products or services they wish for. It’s better to talk to talk to your clients. And develop service products accordingly.

Keep track of numbers

Make sure that you manage your business through numbers and keep track of everything. You must do it in writing and produce written documents for everything. This will help you maintain consistency and train your employees too. Identify the numbers and verify them regularly. Plus, you must make all your decisions depending on these numbers. Among these, one of the most significant estimates is the cash flow document.

— The founder is CEO & CO OOFFRR App