How To Survive First Year As A Startup?

Jayneel Patel
Jayneel is the CEO @ OpenXcell, Leading Mobile App Development Company and Orderhive, a SaaS based Multichannel Order and Inventory Management System

Rolling out a startup is a quite difficult task and for the obvious reasons. It is difficult to spend the money you saved or the guy you convinced to invest in all what you have is an idea. You know what is even more difficult – surviving the first few years, especially the very first year. Trust me, I speak with experience.

So as an entrepreneur, what are the basics to keep as a guiding list pinned on your wall? I had a few of them when I started and in this post, I would love to share them:

1. Get the word out: As a starter, you have such belief in your idea that you only talk about it to the people you really trust, for one major reason – somebody can steal your idea and change the world before you do. Yes, it can happen. But what’s more dangerous is you’ll build a world changing product and the world wouldn’t even know. Talk to people about it, get to the press, write some blogs, and let the world know that you intend to change it.
2. Branch Out: You are neither the first entrepreneur the world has witnessed nor you will be the last. There have been people who have been doing similar things as you or at least have been in the industry for long. Talk to them, network with them. Clear your doubts with them. People love it when you look up to them. More often than not, you’d get something that’d save a lot of effort and resource on your side.
3. Get the Non Believers out: Criticism is one thing, scepticism is another. Once you have tested your idea for innovation and feasibility, you and your team should have total belief in it. You might have to make your team believe that the idea will work. Still, there will be a few always cribbing about a thing or two. Trust me, your company is better off without them, especially in the long run.
4. Don’t build a product for yourself: You have an idea for a product and you build it. The product is exactly like you thought and you love it. Does that make your company a success? No. A company is successful when the intended customers use the product and ‘they’ love it. Always build for your customer.
5. Be lean: Shed every bit of extra weight you are carrying. You can write content for your website, why do you want a copy writer? You want to put banners all over the internet, what happened with the last campaign? Implement – Measure – Revise – Remove is the mantra of success for the new age startups.
6. Learn from surprises: Running a company is much more than you can expect and there are a zillion things that you can learn. Starting from the unusual internet connectivity loss to a blizzard keeping your co-workers away. These are the points you learn management. Every day and every penny costs and you should always keep that in mind.

Everybody has a different personality and I do not believe that my point of view would suit all. It served as a success mantra for me; maybe they can prove to be a failure for somebody else.

Come what may, remember one very important thing about startups – They are not just a company but an experiment and experiments never fail, they just come out with unexpected outcomes at times.

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