There is a time in the life of every person, when they feel totally not satisfied with most parts of it. Often, the root cause and a first thing which is getting fixed or totally reworked is employment or professional activity. In fact, employment shifts to the mentioned professional activity, which doesn’t necessarily imply an employee-employer model.
In other words, there is a moment in the life of every person when they think “Screw it – I’m an entrepreneur and will disrupt the Whatever Industry with my fresh ideas or methods”. Though, before saying everything you think into the face of your boss and finishing the speech with the words “I’m going to be a wealthy entrepreneur”, wait a moment and think about a few actual questions.
Are you enjoying your 40-hours working week?
Because if you aren’t, then you definitely won’t enjoy the unlimited working schedule of an early-stage entrepreneur. The truth is that if you’re going to launch a new company or a startup, then you will realize pretty fast that time is money. Usually the billable units of time are days (servers, domains, and many other), which would lead you to an assumption that you really can’t afford weekends and 8-hour work days any more. You would be working 12 to 16 hours a day and still it won’t guarantee you success of your startup.
Is your product or idea really disruptive and supercool?
Because if it’s not, then just save yourself a few months or years of life and a visible amount of grey hair on your head. Seriously. Don’t start any startup without believing in it. Even if you’re planning to re-sell some random things from the internet (it’s called dropshipping, and can actually be profitable) – you have to believe in the idea and business model really hard.
Let’s try a simple drill to reveal if you’re going to make it with your business idea. Go visit your granny, or ask to visit your younger friend’s granny (you’d probably have to emphasize on the purpose of the visit) and try to explain your idea to her. If you won’t be able to explain your innovative idea or business plan to a senior citizen and convince them that this would work – then you probably won’t be able to do the same with your future potential customers. The thing is that the intelligence of The Crowd and their tolerance to new disruptive ideas would be very close to tolerance of a senior citizen to things which they totally don’t understand.
Do you have family and friends?
Cause if you do and you still want to become an entrepreneur – forget about them. Of course, it’s a joke, though just try to warn them that they would be forgotten by you for a few months or years. The only exclusion would be a situation where your newly launched startup would need some fundraising and the first people whom you will contact would be your friends and family.
Did you make it this far below the questions? Really? And you still want to start your own business, regardless of all the warnings we’ve tried to give you? Because the scary part of the article is coming to an end and below are some of the best life hacks of where to run if you want to start your own company. Sit yourself comfortable and enjoy the reading!
“I want to start a business but don’t know what to do” cheatsheet
1. Look around – there is always a thing
This is the killing advice for people, who just desperately want to do SOMETHING by themselves. Start observing the world around you and ask the correct questions. We’re not defining “correct questions” here, because it’s too personal. After all, even the creator of Useless Machine could have achieved their goal of making something really recognizable over the world. For those who are unaware of the Useless Machine – it’s basically a box with a switch. When you press the switch, the mechanism from inside the box triggers and returns the switch to the initial position.
Though it’s a lot more complicated than that. Every product or a company in this world is designed to resolve some pain points of their targeted audience. What you have to do is live your life open-minded. Every time, when you feel bored or unhappy with the thing happening now or done by you now, spare a minute and think if this is a common problem for a lot of people. If the answer is positive, try to think if there is a chance to fix this paint point with a viable amount of investments and your knowledge. That’s how bi ideas are born.
2. Best products are born naturally
Have you ever thought of the origin of things around you? Yes, we all know how cool Steve Jobs was when he introduced the iPhone in 2007 and disrupted the whole world. But there are a lot of smaller, yet more marvelous stories to tell.
For instance, have you ever heard of stretching wallpapers, which were supposed to be heated and put on the walls? Well, you’ve probably heard about the bubble wrap and used it at least a hundred times in your life. Back in 1957, when bubble wrap was invented, it was supposed to be stretching wallpapers and then greenhouse insulation.
Similarly, MailChimp, the most popular email automation software to date, was founded as a side project of a web development agency with the name Rocket Science Group. They’ve created Mailchimp for their internal use. Then, they were asked to share it with some of their clients because it was really easy and cheap to use. After 6 years, the founders switched to work only on MailChimp. By the way, the CEO of MailChimp is a billionaire now with the help of this small side project of his web development agency.
So, you have to ask yourself, are there any things which you are using every day at work, or you’ve created a Minecraft server to backup smth valuable? You will be surprised, but there is a Minecraft server which works as a virtual version of some library in the USA during the COVID thing.
3. Mind the risks
Even if you’ve invented how to travel in time, don’t put all the eggs in one basket. Some of the most experienced VC managers say that everything is invented or, at least, could be invented in a certain moment of time. The reason why it isn’t invented is because the founders of the projects couldn’t find money to make it working.
To avoid this situation and these calls of desperation to your friends and family in search of funding, you have to work over the budgeting and business plan. Initially, the excel spreadsheet would work. Make two different columns – one for expenses, and one for potential incomes. Then add timeframes. What would be the expenses of launching your startup or supporting it’s operations for a week or a month? Similarly, what should happen within these timeframes to generate at least some income for your project?
After you’ve done this and most probably realized that your project is a huge money-devourer, not a business, try some scenarios on your financial plan. What would happen if a guy whom I know with 5,000 friends on Facebook would post a review of my idea? What would happen if a local startup conference would give me an award in its startup pitch contest. Be as precise as you can with all these scenarios. Ideally, after finishing the drill, you would know a defined set of events and occurrences necessary for your project to survive and prosper. And obviously, you would know the burn rate of your idea.
4. Get off the sofa and Act
At this point of giving birth to a startup, you have to be totally clear with the idea of your future company. The main question now is how to go from ephemeral thoughts in your head to real action. In other words, what does it take for an idea to become a startup. In fact, there are a few things:
Business plan
It was already stated above, that everything is invented, or could be invented. The reason why it’s not happening is the survivability of the idea. The main thing to prove that your future startup is worth a thing is a precise and detailed Business Plan.
There are not many universal pieces of advice, which would fit any business plan of any company. Even though you have to try to think of a situation, when your company would bring yourself and possible investors or stakeholders profit and ability to scale the results. Also, you have to be honest with yourself while creating this plan, because it essentially reflects if your future company would be able to survive. Sometimes it feels right to play with numbers a little bit to make a fake breakpoint opportunity for your future company in a year or two. But don’t be so careless – it would be very painful to see the failure of the project on which you spent more than a year of your life.
Apart from being honest and profitable, you most certainly would need to identify the differentiation point and market positioning of your company. It would be hard to stand a chance against your developed competitors while trying to do “basically the same as them but cheaper and with less automation because we are an early stage startup”.
Name protection
There are plenty of toxic people in the world. Some of them are living to make the lives of other people worse. One of the most painful things for a startup is to face a representative of these people – a patent troll. These guys would patent everything if they would see an opportunity to make a few euros from it.
That is why it’s always recommended to spare some time and take care of legal things at the very beginning. Just submit the papers to confirm your right to own the following naming and branding of the company or whatever item. According to the Companies Registration Office (CRO), it would cost you only €20 to €40 to submit a Business Name Registration form for online and offline forms respectively.
So, as you can see, it wouldn’t take much time and effort to do this, while dealing with the possible negative outcomes of not registering a business name would cost a lot – both in terms of money and time.
Register Your Company
This is the moment of truth – finally it’s time to submit a legal document incorporating your idea into a real and operational company, Isn’t that exciting?
In order to incorporate a company in Ireland, you would have to fill a Form A1, which is available on a Companies Registration Office website. If you’re looking towards an Ltd type of company – you would be able to go through the whole process online. For other types of companies, you would still have to go through the offline part of the registration.
Tax registration
Congrats! The company of your dreams is incorporated. Though, you won’t be able to operate properly, because it would require transfer of funds between your company and other agents. That is why you would need one last legal thing covered – your tax registration number.
Often, your tax agent would support you on this thing, and submit an online registration application to Revenue Online Service. If, for any reason, you don’t have a tax agent, who is supporting you, there is an option of submitting the papers yourself.
5. The beginning of the long journey
Now, when all the paperwork is done, and hopefully your idea is developing with an insane pace, there is one complicated question that you should ask – “How to get people’s attention to my company?”. And you shouldn’t expect a simple answer to this question.
There are several success stories of people developing some sort of ideas, which suddenly became extremely popular and brought tens of thousands of users daily or even hourly shortly after the launch. Though, the reality is that in the modern digital world, where information is surrounding the people 24/7, it’s not so easy to actually catch someone’s attention.
Strategizing on the topic of startup marketing is a topic for a book, not even a separate article. Though, there is one simple life hack, which will help you set up the rough plan of your traction achievement. Make yourself comfortable with a pen and paper and think for some time on all the methods of traction achievement, which may be beneficial for your company. Include all of them, like Social media marketing, Search engine optimization, Influencer outreach, PR, or even handing out leaflets, but try to focus on some of the industry or product-specific ones, because they are usually the most rewarding.
When you have the whole list ready, take another sheet of paper and draw a graph of 2 axes there – one should represent the Cost (ranging from Free to Extremely Expensive) and the other should be Effect in time (Fast to Slow). Try locating the axes in a way that the first quadrant (upper-left one) would represent the cheap and fast methods. After the graph axes are created, try to put all of your traction achievement methods on this graph. For example, SEO would be in the cheaper and Long-playing part of the graph, while Social media ads would be in expensive and fast-playing one.
Now, all you have to do is to start from the cheaper and fast resulting part of the graph and try the ideas one by one. Afterwards, steadily move to cheap and long-term along with the expensive short-term ones. The last ones should be the expensive long-playing actions, for instance building a self-brand of a founder as an industry expert.
6. How to scale the results?
Most probably somewhere between the first and second priority in testing the hypotheses of achieving traction, you will find a mix of a few tactics, which brings better results. Though, the challenge is that, most certainly, they would be working as they are, meaning there is no real way of making a 10x outcome from these methods in a viable future. Even more, in the real world even doubling the positive growth trends is unbelievably challenging. So how do you scale your company exponentially, knowing that both time and money are limited?
The answer is simple – you have to look for some external funding. Similarly, to marketing, there is a topic of separate discussion, but generally there are a few options available:
– Family and friends fundraising. The most secure and easy method – just ask your siblings, cousins, or parents for a few thousands of euros to grow your business and most probably you will get your first external capital. Though, it’s not always enough to fundraise a few thousands in order to really grow the company.
– Look for angel investments. So basically there are some people in the world, who has quite a lot of money and want to have even more by giving a few tens of thousands of euros to promising startups at an early stage in return for the share of equity and future profits. If your startup is a rockstar – then you can try to get the first seed investment from these guys.
– Crowdfunding and alternative finance mechanisms. So, if you don’t want to get someone else’s money in exchange for the share in your company, you may want to try crowdfunding campaigns. There are many unique pitfalls and peculiarities in crowdfunding, but essentially you would just look for a concerning amount of people sharing a few euros with you. While you would promise them to give certain benefits when the company would utilize the fundraised money.
One of the types of crowdfunding is alternative finance systems and mechanisms, for instance, cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, which is a pioneer cryptocurrency, is trusted by a certain amount of people, while some other cryptocurrencies would let you hold an automated and trustless fundraising with crypto for your project. Often, those who invest their crypto in your project expect to get your company’s tokens in return, which are sort of a digitized asset of your company. Cryptocurrency-related fundraising may look easy, promising, and effective, though it is often affiliated with a huge amount of scams and a negative reputation of being a “shady method” of acquiring external capital.
Instead of conclusion
Congrats for making it here! We will see in Analytics if you’ve read it all, or just scrolled down
Anyway, hopefully, this guide helped you to understand if you would really like to start your own company as well as make it to a logical conclusion of your efforts in the form of consistent growth and development of your idea.
Obviously, this guide is just a small hint on a big journey of being an entrepreneur, though we’re more than sure that you would enjoy the whole process! If you have any inquiries abut the guide content, or would like to get some expert’s assistance on how to launch your company within the shortest possible time, as well as achieve the best results – we would like to welcome you to a personal conversation on the topic.