“8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months. A whopping 80% crash and burn.” According to Entrepreneur there is only one thing you need to succeed as a startup, so don’t panic. “Your startup can still succeed. But it will depend on one thing and one thing only. Customers.”
However, developing your product, bringing it to market, finding customers, and keeping them, isn’t so simple. There are some important factors to consider on your quest to success.
Key factors to focus on when running a startup:
- Passion for the product is essential.
- Keep a flexible mentality, proactive attitude, and willingness to persevere through continuous challenges.
- Become a strategist, carefully calculate every decision, and relationship that will affect your business.
- Work on a tight budget. Run your startup on as lean of a budget as possible. Detail every aspect of the business you’ll need money for and set micro-budgets within the overall budget for those expenses.
- Define and know your customers, and know the best ways to market directly to them. You have to be where they are, and where they communicate.
- Networking is essential for finding potential investors, customers, and spreading the word about your product. You need everyone to know that you have a great product, or service, that they can’t live without.
- Develop business alliances early on. Strategic and key partnerships go past conventional business relationships. These are alliances that are essential to your core business function, will mitigate a certain amount of risk, and often block competitors, and
- Establish power partners, or industry catalysts that will provide services and products to your customers.
Many companies have that one great idea and are passionate about their product, but don’t know the first thing about running a business. Aligning your company with an experienced and successful operation can help increase revenue and customer satisfaction.
By developing key business alliances you are enabling your company to become a competitive industry leader. Find alliances by talking with your customers, or potential customers. Key alliances are other companies that call on your customers. They have many more customers, and can help you grow your startup. Alliances keep your fixed costs down, while growing your revenue.