Long time ago, I started a little startup with a couple of friends, it failed (no wonder).
As entrepreneurship awareness is growing significantly in Jordan, I started seeing the key reasons of my first startup failure, mainly in the lack of planning.
Given that the three of us were developers, we jumped directly into execution, and by directly I mean not only we have skipped doing our homework in terms of financial statements, market and business model, but we have also skipped the planning part of the product itself, we coded first and then we designed.. Which to be honest was horrible for the type of product we were building.
After learning few things, and of course I'm still always learning, I can advice you with the following:
- Identify your customers, do your market research, you can find cheap ways to get the statistics data
- Identify their pain, their problem that your product/service is gonna resolve
- Identify how your product/service is gonna solve/ease your customers pain
- What are your revenue streams?
- Build your initial business model
- Build your income statement forecast
- Build your executive summary and your value proposition
- Research and read about the above
- Know the difference between a VC (Venture Capitalist) and an angel investor
As entrepreneurship awareness is growing significantly in Jordan, I started seeing the key reasons of my first startup failure, mainly in the lack of planning.
Given that the three of us were developers, we jumped directly into execution, and by directly I mean not only we have skipped doing our homework in terms of financial statements, market and business model, but we have also skipped the planning part of the product itself, we coded first and then we designed.. Which to be honest was horrible for the type of product we were building.
After learning few things, and of course I'm still always learning, I can advice you with the following:
- Identify your customers, do your market research, you can find cheap ways to get the statistics data
- Identify their pain, their problem that your product/service is gonna resolve
- Identify how your product/service is gonna solve/ease your customers pain
- What are your revenue streams?
- Build your initial business model
- Build your income statement forecast
- Build your executive summary and your value proposition
- Research and read about the above
- Know the difference between a VC (Venture Capitalist) and an angel investor
1 comment:
By the time you do that, in these days, the idea is not relevant anymore.
Start with something small that works, roll it out to a small specific community, if they like it, they will give feedback and it will grow, after there are users and interest, you can figure out a business model. if they do not like it, kill it, learn from that, and do something new. If you do 2-3 projects like this, in 5 years, you would have done 15, one of them should work, it is a lot of work, and requiers a lot of patience, resilience and determination.
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