A Guide to Successfully Start a Tech Startup
Background
Have you ever thought of becoming an entrepreneur? In the modern world with the use of the internet, everyone is a hidden entrepreneur, who has something unique to offer to a marketplace, whether one realises it or not. Some may not realise this and get stuck on a job. Now, I am not against a job. I believe it's a cornerstone to build something new. In fact, a job (9–5/ employee) is just a means for you to pay for your needs until you develop your real job — your purpose (your unique value to the marketplace).
I was hired by a startup, and I was the first engineer to be on board in my company. It was new and exciting, and a bit of despair — whether I could take over such a huge idea — identify business problems and transform them into technical solutions, as expected by my founders.
Nonetheless, I always think of starting something of my own, taking control of my income and offering something unique to the marketplace in a non-linear way. I will share some key takeaways that anyone can take to control the income in their life, identify their unique strengths, how to start a startup and how to navigate this when around 90% of startups are shut down after 2 years of operations. I will mostly talk about tech startup
Identifying Problem
Conduct Thorough Market Research: Get to know your target audience inside out. What are their pain points? What solutions are currently available, and how can you differentiate yourself? By understanding your market landscape, you’ll be better equipped to position your startup for success.
The Idea
Most people start with this phase. “The Idea”. I am not against this. People from Y Combinator will tell you your idea is the most important entity. However, this is not the way to start, I found — at least for me.
You can start with an idea, but before writing “Hello world!” for your startup and visualising a billion-dollar business and imagining thousands of people using your product or service, you should just plan out for the MVP. Trying to prove a concept rather than building a never-ending product lifecycle.
Even before MVP, you should have an exact plan for how you will reach your audience, aka Marketing and Sales. You have to have a distribution. This is important if not the most important bit in a startup rather than product/solution building.
Product Building is just a 30–40 % problem of your startup. 60–70% of your problem is Marketing and Sales.
As a Software Engineer myself, I always felt proud of being a part of the product building team and thought marketing was not that important if I built a good product to serve in a market. Well, no. My mindset is now shifting that build an exact plan for your marketing and sales, and then worry about MVP.
What should you build initially?
- Choose a Name — don’t think too much. You can use tools like Namelix to generate names.
- Get a branding kit — Logo, Colour Palate, Typography, and Voice from
- Get a domain — GoDaddy
- Build a Landing Page with a form to collect email addresses (If no time and it isn’t clear what you are doing, build a coming soon with an option to collect emails)
- Use email generated from company email (@company.com)
Understanding Leverage
A startup’s success comes from scaling. And you can only scale if you have leverage. While a traditional career job doesn’t give you leverage, tides are shifted when you choose to be an entrepreneur. The market will reward you for building a solution and supplying that solution via appropriate sales channels and logistics, at scale. There are four leverages that you can take.
Traditional Leverage
- Capital — The more capital you have or raise, the more leverage you have and hence can scale.
- Labour — Traditionally, more people in a company, more production and hence a business can scale.
Modern Leverage
- Code — A code solution built once will serve many people across the world.
- Media — Contents of any form created online will reach out to many people via the internet and social media and hence you can scale.
You have to rely on all four but more on modern leverages — take small capital, build a small team of engineers and designers, sales guy and digital marketer. Boom, you are now well aware of leverages and scaling.
Applying Leverages: Scale Your Operations
In your online business or SaaS startup, media is the front end of the internet and code is the back end of the internet.
Marketing and Sales (Media as a Leverage)
Having said that build a marketing plan before you even start product building because you don’t want to end up spending two years working on a project and having no users to use it and draining all the money in those two years.
Build Insta, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn Pages and start Posting content about your startup.
Social media is a necessity and acts as a tool to test and validate ideas.
Do not ignore the power of social media and building your audience from day one. Marketing and building audiences start from day one.
Join Facebook groups relevant to the industry and ask questions, engage users, test your ideas, and validate your ideas. You can also tie your startup with your personal brand to engage users.
Product Building (Code as a Leverage)
Minimum Viable Product — MVP (No-Code or Code):
Do not try to build fully-fledged systems from day one and indulge in a never-ending loop of product building and scope creep — all with no users to use and no one else to see and test your product. You are just trying to prove a concept here. Your only goal should be to deliver a prototype in 3–6 months. Focus on developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) — a simplified version of your product that addresses the core needs of your target audience. This agile approach allows you to gather feedback, iterate, and refine your offering based on real-world insights.
This could be code or no-code development. See if you can deliver quickly using no-code tools but if it's not achievable, switch to in-house coding. While creating your MVP, post on social media channels frequently which will give you a sense of what the user wants and whether what you are building is a product-market fit or not.
Fully Fledged Phased Solution (Code):
Given that users are fairly optimistic about your ideas after testing via various social media channels, your business pages or your personal brand page after the MVP phase, if you plan to expand and continue to work on the idea.
Since the no-code solution has very many restrictions and is not cost-effective, aim to move slowly to your native code. Try to use as much as third-party services (e.g. Stripe Checkout Pages, Email Services, Authentication Providers) which integrate well with your code. This gives you time to focus on the actual solution.
Aim slowly to move dependency from external third-party tools and services to your own solution as much as possible technically and cost-wise.
Build a clear roadmap of features and functional requirements of your fully-fledged product.
Team (People as a Leverage)
Try to keep a minimum of team members. Highly skilled individuals in different spectrums. Say three engineers in each front-end, back-end, DevOps, one UI/UX designer, and one social media manager to create marketing contents for your business.
Don’t try to do it all by yourselves. You will be burnt out and still won’t manage to build a “good” product. Do what you do best and delegate the rest.
Tip: Hire employees remotely from another nation where per capita income is significantly lower than the country you are residing. Pay them higher than per capita income in their country and still it will be cheaper to you which is a win-win situation.
Investors (Capital as a Leverage)
At some point, you will be short of money as your startup won't produce any cash flow initially but will take money out of your pocket every month. Instead of relying on your own money till you get your own ROI, you will also have to know how to raise capital and attract investors. They will help you to sustain your startup and scale with leverage. As capital is also a form of leverage you need to take.
Investors only invest in what works and what generates money. For that, they want some proof. Some legit data, and analytics of how people using your product or services are benefitting and how your clients are paying you. They need real-world examples before they even hand out to you, their cheque.
Hence, it is very wise to start or think about the pitch, and collection of analytics from different clients from the very start.
Execution: Iterate and Refine
With a small team, small capital expenses, more software tools and more media content, you gain leverage.
Do not micromanage your team, inspire them, and focus on quality work rather than strict deadlines.
Use free tools like Trello to manage project management, and track sales leads.
Build your tech stack on what most employees know. Use what you know.
This is the basic template that I found to navigate through your startup business.
Apply Unfair Advantages: Blue Ocean Strategy
Agility
Speed defies Gravity. Speed will convert strangers into clients. Speed will create awareness of your brand in your market.
There should be one and one thing in your mind when you start a startup. The clock is ticking. Expenses add up every month. Your best bet? Speed.
From product development to market entry, every aspect of your startup journey requires swift and decisive action. You must be agile enough to adapt to changing market conditions, pivot your strategy when necessary, and seize opportunities before your competitors do. Remember, in the race to success, the early bird often catches the worm.
Even if you are at negative cashflows in the early year, speed will give you a competitive advantage over your other competitors.
Pivot as Market Shifts
Business is something that can pivot when necessary. Startups are most easily to pivot if something doesn’t work. Don’t worry if your initial idea or the solution you built initially didn’t work out as expected.
In the unpredictable world of startups, pivoting — or changing direction — is often necessary to stay ahead of the curve. Monitor market feedback, customer behaviour, and industry trends closely, and be prepared to pivot your strategy, product, or target market if needed. Embrace pivoting as a strategic tool for innovation and growth, rather than a sign of failure.
Conclusion
Remember as long as you are in the game, you have not lost. There will be boring days. There will be tiring days. There will be days of despair. But the longer you are in the game of business, there is no failure. If your startup doesn’t work out, surely it will provide a valuable experience to apply to in your venture in your life.
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