photo credit: cloudzilla
Entrepreneurs agree that shows such as The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den are changing business culture – for the better. “Entrepreneurial” reality TV shows have become popular because they reflect all the problems, issues and situations a startup or small business owner may face.
Reality-Business TV offers an insight into the highs and lows of starting a business and there are quite a few lessons startups can learn;
Don’t overvalue (or undervalue) your business – sales and profit are different
Study Competition – Know about your competition as much as you know about customers
Diversify – New markets, new distribution channels or new verticals; explore all possible avenues
Perfect Your Elevator Pitch and Presentation Skills – it will help communicating with investors, clients, employees etc
Forget your ego – an over-inflated business ego will ignore the ‘cost’ and ‘risk’ realities
Further information on what a startup can learn from business reality shows is provided in the article below:
http://www.allbusiness.com/banking-finance/banking-lending-credit-services/13641763-1.html
Whether you are a start-up seeking investment (think Shark Tank) or an established business in need of a re-launch to abate failure - these shows deliver what could be considered a 50 minute master class in how to succeed in business.
photo credit: Tracy O
In many articles that provide tips to building successful startups, a lot has been written about three key factors: The caliber of a startup team, quality of a startup’s product and size of a startup’s market. Many entrepreneurs believe that the only thing that matters when it comes to startup success is getting a right team/product/market fit. But an important point most startups forget is the cost of customer acquisition. In fact a lot of startups solve the product/market fit problem, but fail because they don’t find a way to acquire customers at a low enough cost.
It is also important to ask yourself the question: can my business realistically expect to acquire customers for considerably less than the amount that I can monetize them?
The service/product your startup is providing may be extremely interesting and compelling. However, if your business doesn’t pay attention on how much will it cost to acquire customers, your startup success dream, perhaps, will just remain a dream.
The article mentioned below gives a detailed explanation on how to calculate the cost of acquiring customers and comparing it with the lifetime value of a customer (LVC) to find out if your startup can really succeed:
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/startup-killer/
The article is a great resource for startups.
Today is the last day of 2009. That means we’re moving into the first new decade of the 2000s. 2009 was not a very good year for startups considering the recession and economic downturn. It was also a rough year on the Venture Capital front. But, there are promising signs that VCs are preparing to ramp up their investment by injecting much needed cash flow into startups in 2010. So that’s good news on the VC investment front but startups also need to make and keep certain resolutions to be successful in the coming year. Here are a few important ones:
1. Simplicity and Stability – reduce unnecessary components and be consistently excellent.
2. Set realistic deadlines and meet them
3. Value your team and their commitment – have a collective vision
4. Be receptive and open to the market – ready to absorb and change accordingly
5. Release Early - Release Often – a balance between perfection and speed
6. Internet Marketing will be indispensable in 2010. A Website design or Website redesign will help your startup keep pace in the competitive market
Happy New Year from the Bhopu Team!
I believe that since you’ve actually come up with a thought of launching a Startup, you do have a magnificent idea and have done all the research around it! And why shouldn’t you? After all, your dream will materialize through your Startup venture. It definitely deserves all the attention and effort.
But don’t forget that no matter how ‘unique’ your idea is, there is always enough competition in the market to pull your startup down. How will you deal with this competition ultimately determines your future in the industry. Customer Service, Convenience, Experience, Economic rates – all of them are offered by mostly all the businesses today!
That’s why the best way to drive people to buy from you is offering something that they can only get from you and no one else. The Marketers call it USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Ask yourself “What is different or better about the products or service my startup has to offer?”
The article below outlines a few steps a startup can take to identify a ‘Killer USP’ and stay ahead of competition:
http://www.startupnation.com/articles/9485/1/unique-selling-proposition-transform-sales.htm
In other words, you need to spend some time looking at your competition. Because it’s impossible to know what makes you unique when you don’t know what anyone else is offering.
Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs find it difficult to find a USP for their business because they’re so involved in it that they forget the real world realm. Define your features and benefits, define your target audience, know your competition and write your USP.
How does Israel—with fewer people than the state of New Jersey, no natural resources, and hostile all around—produce more tech companies listed on the NASDAQ than all of Europe, Japan, South Korea, India and China combined? Israel has transformed the challenges it has faced into assets that form the key of its ‘culture of innovation’. Adversity of all kinds, have forced Israelis to be resourceful, to do more with less, to innovate and be global from day one. There are quite a few parallels we can draw between Israel and startups; passion, resourcefulness and persistence being the most important ones.
- Passion – something you should feel as an entrepreneur, for the startup life, for your company, for your vision – is all-encompassing
- Resourcefulness – know how to get information and results you want
- Persistence – keep fighting till the end
Israel is an apt synonym for the global impact a startup business can make despite having “enemies” with massive resources. Senor and Singer from Start-Up Nation have written a book on lessons a business/startups can learn from Israel.
Throughout Nation, Israelis are a frank-speaking people who are willing to explore the world, to learn from those experiences, and to be persistent with implementing ideas in business. Managers at Intel Israel, for example, are credited for changing Intel’s strategic decision to no longer seek increased processor clock speed and instead create new processing paths.
Read the book summary and this itself will give you some good idea of what lies beneath (in the book)
