Ariel Rosenthal is a co-founder of Xprt , a new start looking to provide immediate technical assistance and advice of reliable experts and approved purchases.
Working on startups for the past 10 years, I have had some successes and some failures. There are six months I draw the curtains on a start I spent years of my life, but now I'm working on new business .
A new era of tech events began
We're back in New York in November for the 4th edition of our technology event focused on growth .
Having experienced so many ups and downs, I now feel much more prepared and confident I acquired tools and learned lessons that help me avoid another failure.
I previous post I shared some ideas on how to validate your idea before you jump into deep water. But what happens once your idea is validated? What are the next steps? Here are some tips to get you going.
carefully select your core team
Find cofounders is extremely difficult. There are not many people who are willing to leave their comfortable jobs and join a demanding project and often discouraging could probably end by default.
It is also very difficult to find people with enough self-discipline and motivation to take a non-existent dream and turn it into reality. That's why you should be extremely careful when you come across someone who is really willing to take that risk and not automatically welcome them on board.
Like it or not, when you find your co-founder, congratulations, you just get married. You are about to spend a lot more time with your co-founder you spend with your spouse. You will experience moments happy and satisfied, but also hard and difficult.
Like marriage, you need to find the right match; someone who meets you and stronger instead of the other version of yourself doing. Find someone who listens and can take criticism, but also stands on its own and speak their mind.
You are not looking for an employee, but a co-founder, who can contribute and push the business forward. The great founding teams are often composed by a technical person and one person business / marketing. If you want to add a third co-founder, I would look for a good person UX / UI to supplement the core team.
Having the wrong team is one of the most common reasons for startup failures. It is also one of the reasons for my own failures. Make sure you do not take this decision lightly.
Do not waste your time creating a business plan
One of the things they teach you in school to business is how to create a business plan. They put so much emphasis on it, that when you graduate, you think before you do anything else, you must first write a business plan.
This may be good in theory ... but totally useless in real life. Fresh out of business school, the first thing I did before I begin my old company had to write a business plan. This ended up being a file we did not open once in three years. No investor wanted to see and our society has changed so rapidly that it became unimportant almost instantly.
A summary, a field platform and a financial projection are the things you need to spend your time on.
Good summary is a short version of a company plan, no more than two pages. It must clearly communicate the message and vision of the company, but above all, it must appeal to investors. It requires the same amount of research as a business plan, but you will not spend days putting it all in writing.
Since the resume is short and catchy, investors can take in the key points at a glance and read all in a few minutes. That's about all the time, they will give you first. Here is a guide on how to write the perfect resume.
Once you have the written summary, you are ready to create the argument . Here's what you use when pitching to investors, but investors often ask to see before a meeting. It should be catchy to the point, and not more than 10 slides.
A good field platform describe the problem and your solution, describe the competitive landscape and your competitive advantage, describe your present achievements and your roadmap for the coming months, describe how you will make money outside, and finally present the team that will do it all.
This is a good guide on how to create a field platform. If you want to stand out, invest time on the design of the platform. See this site for inspiration.
Finally, the financial projection is probably the most important part of a business plan. This is a worksheet that you will often see and edit. It is most important to you and your company for investors because it will help you set goals, determine how much money you spend, how many employees you will need to hire and how much money you need to raise.
It will also help you determine if your business model is valid and later will tell you whether your assumptions were good. You can easily find great financial projection models with a quick Google search.
It can not be overemphasized that investors have severely attention span. They see and hear countless locations every month, so you need to be as creative as you can to get their attention.
Start building relationships with investors
The fundraiser is a lengthy process that takes months and can often be extremely frustrating. Do not wait until the last minute to start fundraising. Even if you think you have the greatest idea since the invention of the iPhone, chances are this idea will change several times before becoming successful.
Investors know, which is why they almost never invest in someone send a cold email. They are much more likely to invest in the people they know and believe what it takes to create a successful business.
This is why you should start early. Try to present to investors, or find them on meetups and conventions. Tell them about your business, but avoid trying to sell to them. Ask their opinions and engage. They have so much experience, their advice is likely to enrich your product and you warn of obstacles that you may have failed to prepare differently.
Monitoring and keep them in the loop by sending updates on your progress every few weeks. When it comes time to raise money, it will be much easier for you to approach them. Until then, they will already know your product, the stepping stones you took and took an active part in the process.
If you have done a good job, they should be engaged with your product, and that means they are more likely to want to invest.
Marketing is no less important than the programming
Most startups do not start thinking about marketing after months of development and once MVP (Minimum Viable product) is ready. Planning the marketing strategy and building an online presence is as important if not more important than product development.
Your product could be really beautiful and revolutionary, but what is good for if nobody knows about it? You must work in parallel with your developers and surface preparation before launch.
Create a landing page and start collecting potential users emails. Do not ignore these users. Keep them interested by sending an occasional newsletter.
Build an online presence. Understand your target audience and begin to engage with it. Write guest blog posts on relevant blogs, comments on forums and give answers on Q & A sites like Quora .
Try to get bloggers in your area interested in your story and write about your startup. Do not send generic emails to bloggers list. Understand that you write and show them you know who they are .
Learn about the growth of piracy. It will open your world to a variety of new possibilities. A good place to start is Growth Hacker TV .
Starting a business without money
I entered this new business after getting a very small salary on my previous start. Bootstrapping when you have no money may seem impossible, but I am now learning how can be achieved in spite of that fact.
We are co-founders. I took the role of CEO since I have lots of experience with business and product development, and my co-founder took the role of CTO since he was the top programmer. We are both developers not moving or very good user interface designers.
Of course, we could learn a new programming language and developed a mobile application, but that would have meant delaying the entire project a few months, a luxury we could not afford. Instead, we stuck to what we knew, created the entire back-end logic and hired a UI designer and an iOS programmer to develop our client.
How could we hire two people without money? South America and Eastern Europe both offer great quality programmers and designers who charge a lot less money than what you expect to pay in the US. By essentially, I mean as low as 10 percent, and sometimes less.
Make sure you agree on a fixed price for the whole project and never pay on an hourly basis. By taking this approach saved us months of work and produced a better product than what we could have produced that beginners programming language.
You can find high quality designers on Dribbble and programmers on various freelance markets, such as Elance and oDesk . These are also good places to find help for your marketing efforts.
Having only two people in the core team and many hours in the day, means you must delegate tasks. With a small budget of a few hundred dollars per month, you can hire people to help you write blog posts, gather information, conduct research and even help strengthen your online presence.
Be agile
One of the biggest mistakes I made in my last start was not time to go to realize that the concept did not work. We were so confident in our vision that we were blind to the fact that just does not solve a big enough pain.
Six months passed before we recognized this and turned to something that turned out to be much more successful. Six months are important for a startup. Due to this loss of time, we ended up without enough money to succeed with the pivot and eventually had to close the business.
Plan ahead, think about different scenarios and have a plan B and C. Most importantly, be flexible and agile. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, and then Albert Einstein said.
If something does not work, it probably will not start working at once. Take a different path, try another method and not be as stubborn and crazy as we were.
Growth vs profit :? What rising startups should focus on the first