You're finally ready to take the plunge and try to change the world with a single idea. Congratulations! Grit and grind will help you overcome a fledgling startup’s inevitable challenges. Knowledge will help even more, so take in these eight tips to start your startup off on the right foot.
Have a Viable Idea
To paraphrase part of Mark Zuckerberg's famous quote, your startup doesn't necessarily need to break stuff. However, it does need to offer a product or service people want to buy. Before anything else, you'll have to make sure there's a market out there large enough to support your brilliant idea.
Look for market gaps, niches within niches, and underserved customers with problems no one else has picked up on. A viable idea won't guarantee success, but it makes reaching it much less of an uphill battle.
Take Care of the Legal & Logistics Stuff
Startups might be businesses on overdrive, but they’re still businesses. That means you’ll have to settle on a name, choose a business model – usually a Limited Liability Company (LLC) will do – and get an Employer Identification Number from the IRS.
This will let you open business bank accounts and hire a team. While you’re at it, familiarize yourself with all the laws and regulations your business needs to comply with to avoid future trouble.
Bring Together the Right People
While making it as a solopreneur isn’t impossible, it’s playing the already challenging startup game on hard mode. You might be a whiz at creating innovative products, but are you as adept at dealing with finances? Or customers? Or suppliers?
Surrounding yourself with people who compensate for your blind spots gives everyone more room to focus on their specialties and improve the startup's odds. Plus, the extra perspectives can contribute to better, more unique offerings.
Build a Strong Collaboration Framework
No startup succeeds in isolation. Effective communication and teamwork will be crucial to your growth, whether within your founding team, with early employees, or when working with external partners. Establish clear channels for discussions, decision-making, and task management from day one. Tools like Slack, Notion, or Trello can keep workflows organized and transparent.
When sharing sensitive information like login credentials, use only the best password managers instead of relying on emails or messaging apps, and encourage this.
Nail Your Business Plan
Now comes the most important part — formalizing your idea and convincing potential investors it has merit. A thorough business plan helps in several ways.
On the one hand, it provides clear information on your business structure, products, growth projections, and financial needs. On the other hand, it helps turn a promising but vague idea into an achievable goal and provides a structured track with actionable steps toward achieving it.
Secure Funding
Having enough money to sustain your business and yourself through the early stages is essential and achievable through diverse means. Risks and drawbacks are always involved. Slower growth and personal liability in the case of bootstrapping or pressure to do better quickly from angel investors or venture capital. The trick is to balance needs with obligations, leveraging a strong product and vision to find investors whose ideals align with yours.
Market Your Startup
On paper, you could be poised to become the next Uber or Airbnb, yet fail like so many others because you didn’t build momentum in time. Social media, email, and established influencers are some avenues you can pursue when getting the word out. Make sure your brand is on point and that you're targeting an audience that's already interested in what you're offering to maximize success.
Work Safely
Doing enough for three while trying to keep customers and investors happy all too often sees startup founders neglecting their business's cybersecurity needs. Protecting your intellectual property, not to mention personal and financial customer data, is a day-one priority. Unless you're keen on experiencing the reputational and monetary fallout of compromised digital assets, that is.
Cybersecurity should never be an afterthought, and modern solutions are so seamless it doesn’t need to be. For example, setting up a password manager to make all account credentials unique and secure them with extra authentication takes little time and effort.
Other means, like using a VPN whenever connecting to company networks remotely, are equally easy to implement and enforce. VPNs for iOS and Android, as well as all desktop operating systems, are widely available, and teaching remote members how to set up and connect through a VPN takes part of an afternoon at best. Yet the encrypted connection that now protects their communication, data exchanges, and browsing lasts as long as your subscription.
Be Adaptable
Change is the only certainty in the turbulent startup world. Embracing it from the outset will help your business meet inevitable market and trend shifts head-on. Flexibility is also invaluable for prioritizing customer demands over your ego to create products and services people are satisfied with and genuinely recommend.