Startups are popping up like mushrooms everyday, pretty much every startup has the same message.
“We are a startup, we are in search of funding…“How wonderful will it be to get funding… the startups that get funded are celebrities.
They do get exemplary treatments in the media circuits, suddenly they are news worthy materials.
Of course they could be having something very serious and sincere, disruptive to market kind of service, by way of addressing immediate business or social problem.
Whenever this happens, you will notice that several similar startups popup at every zone.
They even book similar names.
If FlipKart became famous, then there are so many others with names ending with the same old KART.
Not many among them succeed and the ones that do succeed have some very common points that can be traced as a pattern.
Here is a look at exactly five common aspects of successful start-up companies.
Startup Ingredient #1: Keeping it Simple.
They never had a complex business proposition to make. None of them ever did.
They just made something that was easy for just about anyone to understand.
These kind of startups went viral, found great user adoption and increased market share.
They became attractive enough for investors to invest and markets to further adapt.
They grew rapidly!
FlipKart.com only sold books, simple, easy to understand and was offering at better prices and people found an easy way to buy books.
They did this when computers were replacing everything paper based and there were even debates if the paper based publishing industry will survive.
Amazon.com did something similar.
WhatsApp did it viral.
The messaging and purpose clarity was precise.
Ingredient #2: Capability Came First
With every successful startup, the story of the entrepreneur will be about struggle or them being a genius.
The only story that makes any sense to us, is that they had the inherent capability to transform an idea to executed action.
They did not run in the market with simple ideas, rather did their own work.
Got their hands dirty.
There are several entrepreneurs, who wrote their own code, built their own product or at least did the ground architecture development hands-on and are also running around in the market, meeting every potential prospect to get the deals signed in.
Some Products are revolutionary, some are way ahead of their time, some get funded, some… they just do not need funding.
Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, both did a lot of things hands-on.
Bottom line is that these people had the capability first, funding came later.
Ingredient #3: Team
Startups generally struggle with building a good competent team. The leadership development is a very vital essence for any business to stand and survive, grow on.
However, not all startups find it easy to build committed, competent teams.
This is not something that can just happen, but it takes a lot of time, effort, culture, vision, meaningful mission goals to build a competent team.
Every company struggles with this aspect, not just startups. It is not that there are not many competent people around, it’s about getting them to join you and stay with you…
Ingredient #4: The Go to Market Strategy
So, with the success of ecommerce businesses and the fact that ecommerce business has a very low entry criteria, pretty much the rat race to get an ecommerce startup going became a thing…
The problem is not that everyone wants to get in to that business, the problem is, no one plans for what to do after they have their business setup.
Generally, startups have a simple issue.
They never planned for how to take their business to their target customer base and expected things to happen on their own.
A true breed success story, which happened without any funding, usually would have taken anywhere up to 1000 days to happen.
Are you prepared to survive that long? Do you have the contingency to survive for that long?
Not just survive, also build good market traction before the market starts noticing you?
The ones that are successful today are really good at that.
Ingredient #5: Concentration, Not Obsession & Not Just Dedication
Bringing business to a level of sustenance requires commitment and dedication, but to grow a business to great success, requires complete obsession behind it.
However, there is another secret to their success. If I may be as astute to claim it as a secret.
It’s best to express in the words of the great modern era sage Swami Vivekananda:
“Concentration is like the air you breath, the blood in your veins, it is not about focusing on a task for a few minutes or hours… it is about having an idea and working on the idea tirelessly, not letting it get diluted by other thoughts, not letting hurdles stop you from attaining your goals:”
Note: These are not the exact words, but are the best I can do to recollect, however, I am pretty sure that the message is exact.
Every successful entrepreneur worked on an idea, made it in to a compelling case for others to accept that idea and became a gradual and eventual and inevitable success.
Closing Notes
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Original Source – 5 Ingredients for a Successful Tech Start-up
