Startups are founded by one or more entrepreneurs who want to develop a product or service for which they believe there is demand. These companies generally start with high costs and limited revenue, so they look for capital from various sources such as venture capitalists. Here we present a distilled sense of twelve factors that play a significant role in determining the success of a startup
1. Business Idea
A great business idea can not succeed without it. Extensive research must be conducted into the industry and product-market fit. The initial conclusions will help you evaluate how qualified you are to implement your business idea.
2. Business Plan
Creating a detailed and sensible business plan allows companies to strategise their development, monitor progress, and make timely adjustments. This includes determining short-term and long-term goals, Key Performance Indicators, Growth Strategy and funding.
3. Core Team
Building a team of driven professionals who are competent, dedicated, and ready to put in the extra work is a predisposition for success. The attitude of the founding members, combined with how they interact with each other and how each one of them contributes to developing the idea, may determine whether the business will make it or not. Building a business plan at the initial stages of your journey may help the core team clear up any disagreements before they become an issue and set down ground rules. In addition, it should be clear from the beginning what the chain of command is and whether there is a single leader to make the tough calls or a board of equal partners.
4. Execution Timing
A product may be thoughtful, functional, and designed to make people’s lives easier, but the market may be reluctant to accept it. In addition, products that strongly depend on technology may be constrained by the stage of development of the solutions they need to support them.
5. Market Research
Knowing the customer well is a crucial success factor for startups or businesses that want to prosper commercially. Startups that conduct market research and build buyer personas based on statistical facts are more likely to create efficient marketing and sales strategies that accurately target their audience.
6. Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is a powerful tool enabling companies to understand the marketplace and business environment better. Entrepreneurs can collect ideas for product development, marketing, pricing, and sales strategies and figure out ways to improve their business plans and ideas. In addition, looking at their rivals’ successes provides businesses with a new angle from which to explore their customer’s preferences and buying habits. Leveraging this information, they may calculate what market share they would potentially be able to cover and how to attract new customers with a unique business proposition.
7. Design Thinking
Design thinking is an iterative process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions you can prototype and test. Teams that build products are often composed of people from various departments. For this reason, it can be challenging to develop, categorise and organise ideas and solutions for the problems you try to solve. Design thinking could be employed to keep the project on track and organise core ideas. Results from the final stage of the initial work process inform our understanding of the problem, help us determine the parameters of the problem, enable us to redefine the problem, and, perhaps most importantly, provide us with new insights so we can see any alternative solutions that might not have been available with our previous level of understanding.
8. UX Research
UX (user experience) research is learning what end users of a system or product need and want, then employing those insights to enhance the design process for products, services or software. UX research can take different forms depending on the area of focus. It helps uncover user behaviours, needs and motivations to make products, services and websites more intuitive and enjoyable for users. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, UX Researchers conduct comprehensive research and share the insights from research with the UX designers.
9. Product Development
Startups that constantly work to improve their products, listen to their customers, and strive to satisfy their needs are more likely to adapt and stay in business.
Adaptivity doesn’t mean putting behind your vision and values in the name of profits. However, compromises must sometimes be made to make more considerable progress in the future.
10. Business Model
A business model is how a company exchanges its products for money. Defining it is not a top priority for startups because it’s not an immediate necessity – how to proceed usually becomes evident when developing the products and understanding the client better. Whether the business operates online or offline, business models can be digital or traditional. And as the demand for digital services and availability is now higher than ever, even strictly offline companies should consider creating a digital model and capitalising on their online potential. Business models have to evolve and grow with the company. Startups that invest time considering their options can set clear goals and strategise how to achieve them. If they stay agile, they have better chances of succeeding.
11. Pricing Strategy
Defining the suitable pricing model is one of the most minor appreciated growth tactics and, at the same time, among the most profitable ones.
Pricing research lets companies base their pricing decisions on facts and market trends rather than assumptions.
12. Creating Demand
Startups, especially in the tech industry, often focus on creating a fantastic solution with advanced functions and strive to refine it to perfection. However, companies that work to create demand for their answers, and focus on the customer rather than only the product, have better overall success rates.
Bottom Line
Startups that approach their endeavours strategically and leave little to chance usually stay in business longer and achieve growth faster. Many vital factors define a company’s path to development and future success; vision, planning, hard work, and persistence are also behind every single one.
Furious Fox is a web development agency in London providing intelligent and innovative solutions to all your technology needs. Our team of experts lets you leverage the current trends in technology to further your business.
