steps to launch your startup

Steps to start your own business
© Businessyard 2013

Dream big and start small
If you are dreaming about starting your own company, but you don’t
know exactly what it is you want to do or if it’s even the right time,
use your time to study. Starting a fast-growing tech business is
incredibly challenging, and requires a variety of skills. The time you
take for studying, allows you to explore your talents and find the one
thing you really excel at

Work to learn, not to earn
Now that you’ve studied hard and really gotten deep into
a particular discipline, it’s time to broaden your skill set.
While it’s critical to become deeply skilled in one area of
the business, the required skill-set to start and run a
company is much more varied. Starting a business
requires a strong sense for products, timing, trends and
markets, which you can only acquire through experience

Join the community and meet
founders
If you start an international business, you’ll be
competing with intelligent, ambitious, and highly skilled
people from all around the globe. It’s a huge challenge
and having a great community of entrepreneurs,
developers and designers for support is key

Find the right location
Depending on your new business, location does
matter. If you are an Internet/software business,
take care you pick a location that helps you to start.
If you’re on a tight budget co-working spaces is a
great choice to find something affordable and they
are not only right at the epicenter of the
community, but also very beautiful and lively.

Identify good and bad ideas, early
To pick this one idea, it starts with the ability to identify
your own problems, and think about clever and smart
solutions. One big problem can be solved by thousands
simple solutions, it’s your job to find the best one. You
need to become your biggest critics. Challenge every
single idea with your team to the extreme. Be aware
that most ideas that seem great in the first place, are
either already taken or not so great once you’ve
challenged them further. Try to play devil’s advocate.

Understand trends and markets
As an entrepreneur you start a company with long-term goals. You
want to create something that stays and adds value to people’s
lives, both your customers and your employees.
The challenge is to balance the awareness for trends and
momentum without making yourself or your product a slave of
those. It’s like surfing. You can’t change the ocean, so you need to
observe and read the water and get on your feet in the exact right
moment to ride the wave.
Do your homework before you start with your idea, understand
how big your market is, understand in which countries you can
grow the fastest. Build a brand and a product that works globally,
not just in your country. Really, the world is your market.

Think like an athlete – Define your
mission
When I talk about entrepreneurship, I often talk about athletes.
Athletes always train with a clear objective, like participating in a
competition, or more specifically winning it. If you want to be an
entrepreneur, think like an athlete and define your own mission.
Why do you want to build a business? What’s your main
objective as an individual? What do you want your own career to
look like in 30 years? Don’t be small-minded! Widen your horizon
and think how you want to influence the people around you, and
maybe even change the world. Define the purpose of your
business, and you as an individual.

Prepare to fail, 95% do
That’s a tough one, but it’s so important. Starting a global
business with international, well-educated and highly-skilled
people, is incredibly hard. You will experience unbelievable
lows, including running out of money, or seeing important
people leaving or shutting down a business you worked so
hard for. Being an entrepreneur means taking risks, because
without that you will never be truly successful.
It’s important you understand the risks, and start managing
them. If you blindly run into a new adventure, these lows will
hurt much more than they should. The better you do your
homework, the more likely your company will be able to
survive.

Find the right co-founders and
advisors
Starting a company isn’t easy. However, there is a way to
help manage risks and to deal better with day-to-day
challenges – and that is by having great co-founders.
Having the right co-founders is incredibly important. You
deal with them every day and you will fight, win and lose
together. It’s hard to find them, because you will only
know you’ve made the right choice, after you start or
complete your adventure together

Raise your first round of money, or
bootstrap
There are two ways to start a business. You either do it on your
own, taking all risks and responsibility yourself (“bootstrapping”),
or you find investors that believe in your company.
When you start your first business, avoid the common mistakes.
Don’t pitch too early, and don’t pitch to world-class venture
capitalists before you are ready.
If you want to get an investor on board, try to understand what
investors care about – it’s mainly the team and the product.
Focus on building a prototype, test your business model and
create a clear strategy to become a sustainable and scalable
business fast. Talk to investors when you are ready, not when you
have something on paper – build up your story

Learn how to hire and maintain your
company culture
Determining who to hire is a powerful skill to have and it’s very
difficult to learn. As a founder you need to develop this skill very
quickly. You will make mistakes early on, and it’s vital that you
identify them and correct them very quickly. Creating a sustainable,
healthy and positive company culture in a fast-growing and fast-
changing startup environment is tough
It’s very hard as a young entrepreneur to correct hiring decisions.
Don’t be scared to correct your mistakes quickly. Also, if your
business grows, don’t lose the skill to objectively judge your team.
It’s often hard for your initial team to keep up with the progress of
the business, you are entering new stages very quickly. It’s often
hard to talk about, but when a business grows up, it’s often time to
improve the team, rather than grow it

Prepare to become a manager
The road from being a founder, to becoming a CEO or a manager is a
very long and bumpy one. Being a manager and being a founder are
two different things. You need to learn this very quickly. A founder
often sets the tone, the mission, the speed, the ethic, the culture.
Being a founder – a programmer, or a designer, or a salesperson –
requires a totally different skill set than being a manager. Being a
founder means to work – being a manager means to think. The job
of a manager is to carefully make decisions, easy ones and tough
ones. You need to define the business strategy, recruit people, build
teams, motivate employees, set and measure goals, empower
ownership, create partnerships, take care of financials

Businessyard offer
Consultation
Advice
Support
Assistance

SPECIAL THANKS
Goes to the famous entrepreneur
Christian Reber (founder of
Wunderlist mobile app), since most of
his points are taken from his blog 

Thanks for Listening!

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