Management

5 Startup Tips From the Experts

Write Business Plan

If you’re in the tech startup industry, you might want to start sweating now. According to Wamda, approximately 90 percent of tech startups will fail for reasons including competition, a lack of funding and a lack of overall experience. With all of this stacked against you, you might find it worthwhile to educate yourself on a few startup tips from experts that made it big.

Funding is Everything

One of the main reasons startup businesses falter is due to a lack of funding. The Guardian provides expert insight on how to procure funding from some of the best minds in the industry. You will need to ask yourself how investors will see your company, and what it is they may stand to gain. If your venture is particularly risky, your investors will need to see greater returns. You can also consider government grants specific to your industry.

Understand Your Market

Many startup companies, tech startups in particular, falter because they cannot find a market for their product, because they have misidentified the market for their product or because the market for their product is already oversaturated. As an entrepreneur notes in For Entrepreneurs, market timing is also very important. Multiple companies, for instance, attempted to provide streaming television and failed before consumer bandwidth providers like Verizon could support the business model.

Build Your Team

It’s very important that you create a team that is reliable, trustworthy and dependable. This team needs to be very light, as you can’t afford to carry any dead weight with you. A management team needs to be experienced and knowledgeable, and each component to your team needs to have something unique that they bring to the table. One entrepreneur-cum-venture capitalist stated in Both Sides of the Table that the appropriate steps are: recruit, assign roles, measure performance, identify gaps and discuss the structure.

Always Be Learning

A successful entrepreneur needs to always be learning about new opportunities, technology and avenues. The CEO of Mashable, Pete Cashmore, has stated that his personal mantra is to always “keep listening.” By keeping your nose to the ground at all times, you’ll be able to predict changes in the market before they occur. You’ll also be able to jump onto new developments early on in the game, and this expert timing can make all the difference in whether your business is a success or a failure. It’s always a good idea to read everything you can about businesses and business management philosophy, even though you may not necessarily believe everything you read.

Do Your Research

Too many startups both begin and end with a dream. Many business owners have an idea but don’t do the applicable research. You do not want to be one of these owners. You need to run the numbers again and again to determine whether what you’re seeing in your mind is something that can actually be reality. According to their website, the CEO of Switch Video has stated that he initially had problems with his tech startup because he guessed in regards to pricing rather than actually doing the research he needed to do early on. These types of guesses and estimations can prove quite costly in the long run.

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Paul Tomaszewski is a science & tech writer as well as a programmer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of CosmoBC. He has a degree in computer science from John Abbott College, a bachelor's degree in technology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and completed some business and economics classes at Concordia University in Montreal. While in college he was the vice-president of the Astronomy Club. In his spare time he is an amateur astronomer and enjoys reading or watching science-fiction. You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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