Ideas are easy! But starting up?
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Ideas are easy! But starting up?

Ideas are easy. Starting up is challenging and writing about your journey in a framework fashion, even more killing!! Thanks shweta jain for helping come up with this!!

And, Making a business out of them is the hardest part.

The biggest mistake new entrepreneurs make is not treating their ideas carefully. You want to make sure you prepare thoroughly before starting a business, but realize that things will almost certainly go awry. To run a successful business, you must adapt to changing situations. Conducting in-depth market research on your field and the demographics of your potential clientele is an important part of crafting a business plan. 

Here's a process that'll take you through the entire pre-launch process, step by step.

1. A WHY

Here’s the difficult truth: Starting a business is hard.

If it were easy, everyone would be entrepreneurs who own their own businesses. If you can overcome the hurdles along the way, the reward of owning and building your own business is well worth it.

However, you need something to lean on when times do get hard. You need a why. Why am I doing this? Why should I keep going?

Task

Write a description of your life as you imagine it in 5 years after you’ve started your own successful business.

 • What does your day to day look like?

 • How much financial freedom do you have?

 • What are your stress levels like?

 • How much time do you get to spend with your family?

Include everything that is important to you. Include pictures, emotions and vivid descriptions. The more life-like the better.

That’s your “why”. That’s what you’re going to refer to every single time things start getting tough.

2. A PROBLEM

The most common mistake most first-time entrepreneurs make: Starting with a solution.

Every good business is built off the back of a problem that people need to solve, and will pay money to do that.

The customer might not know that problem exists yet (think of when Facebook was founded, no one knew they needed it), but every good business solves a problem.

Task

What problem are you solving? Write it down.

3. A SOLUTION

You’ve got your problem, now you need a way to solve it.

The strength of your solution is going to be a big determining factor in how successful your business is.

When you think you’ve found a good solution to the problem, consider these:

 • Do you have the skills/know-how/drive to make that solution come to life?

 • Does your solution suit you as a person?

 • Does your solution suit your desired lifestyle? (Think about step 1)

Task

If you’ve answered those three questions and you’re still positive about how you’re going to solve your problem, you’ve found ‘product-founder fit’.

If you are unsure about one of the three answers, start brainstorming. How can you solve the problem (step 2) in such a way that after these three questions you’ll still be excited about the project.

4. A CUSTOMER

Now you need to find out if someone is going to buy your solution to their problem.

A lot of first-time entrepreneurs could save themselves a lot of wasted time, effort and money down the line by doing this thoroughly. But they don’t.

The reason is, there’s a stigma attached to business ideas. Most people think you should hold them sacred and wrap them in bubble wrap until it’s time to make money.

That’s absolutely the worst way to handle a business idea.

Before you make a business out of a potential solution, you need to thoroughly test it. Put it through its paces. Pick it apart from every angle possible. If it stands up to that — it’s a good one. If it doesn’t — great. You’ve saved yourself a lot of time and money and you can free up some mental bandwidth for finding the next problem that needs to be solved.

Task

Go to where your customers are and ask. You can do this in so many ways, among these:

 • Cold e-mail,

 • Quora,

 • Reddit,

 • Phone call,

 • In-person (meeting, conferences, etc).

You’d be surprised at how forthcoming people are with advice/input when you ask them for it.

5. CUSTOMER PROFILE

We’ve dealt with the what, the how — now it’s time for the who. As in, who is going to buy your product.

The biggest mistake people make is not clearly defining their target audience. Remember, you’re solving a specific problem for a specific person. You can’t sell that problem to everyone.

Task

The best way to make sure your company is aligned with who they are targeting is to create a very specific customer profile. This is a very in-depth description of who your customer is, what they do, what their habits and interests are, and how they interact within your market.

6. CUSTOMER ANALYSIS

You know who your customer is. Now, it’s time to check that you’ve got product-customer fit.

It’s all good and well having a great product, but if you’re trying to sell it to the wrong people, you’re not going to make any progress.

Task

Answer these questions, sequentially:

 • How many customers are there, like the one you’ve described above?

Using a search metrics to quantify this would a great idea.

If you use a tool like Google Ads, they have a Keyword Planner which will also suggest keywords that are similar. Build a list of keywords and then check for the search volume. 

 • Can your customer use the solution?

 • Where can you find/reach those customers easily?

Think of both digital and in real life.

7. A PROBLEM-SOLUTION FIT

Problem-solution fit is basically answering the question of: “Does my solution actually solve the problem that I built it off of?”

It sounds fairly self-explanatory. But a lot of founders can get this wrong. They build something which they think solves the problem perfectly, but for a variety of potential reasons, actually fails.

Task

The main question you need to ask yourself here is: Who is this for?

If you’ve properly defined your customer above, then this step is a lot easier. If you’re trying to be everything to everyone, this becomes difficult.

8. INDUSTRY ANALYSIS

That’s most of the hard work done.

Now you need to know what arena you’re stepping into. What does the industry you’re jumping into look like? Where are the companies that are succeeding (and more importantly), where are the companies that are failing?

Be prepared for this to take you a solid day of reading and researching. It’ll be worth it. You’ll learn from other companies’ mistakes so you don’t make them yourself, and capitalize on other companies’ successes without having had to have find your way there.

Task

Ask yourself this: If I were one of my potential customers, how would I find the service/product I’m providing?

Would you Google it? Ask on a forum?

Do that, and find the 5 (or more, if you want to be more thorough) competitors in the space you’re entering.

9. STARTUP CAPITAL

One of the most daunting things that face most entrepreneurs: Where do I get the capital to start?

If you don’t have any savings or an additional income that can get your business started, it can be a major hurdle.

This is why internet (specifically information) businesses are exemplary! They require almost no capital to get started and the only investment you have to make is time.

And because they’re cash generators, they’re very easy to bootstrap with literally no capital investment.

10. PERSONAL TRAIT ANALYSIS

Because you’re likely going to be going on this journey by yourself, you need to understand what you’re going to be up against.

By doing a strength and weaknesses audit on yourself before your start, you’ll know what you’re going to:

 • Be good at (and therefore want to do), and

 • Be poor at (and therefore shy away from).

Task

Do an audit of your strengths and weaknesses. List them, and their associated category (people, product or innovation). Those are three guidelines based on three areas of building a business — you might want to add more.

Be brutally honest with yourself. It’s going to guide you in where you need to spend time, and spend less time.

So, if you’ve ticked the ten boxes above, you’ve got a business idea that’s based on a validated problem people have, with a solution that people are willing to pay for, and enough people to sell it to.

You’ve got an idea that is worth turning into a business.

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Gaurav Dubey

Sr PM at Walmart | Formerly Adobe, GlobalLogic | IIM Lucknow

3y

We often think our idea is the what customers are going to pay us for, but the truth is we need to solve their problem first. First step is getting the understanding of real problem! Excellent article Sumit Kumar Singh, simple explaination of complex entrepreneurship journey.

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Anurag Mishra

Product @Wework | Ex-Sharechat | Ex-Pintek

3y

Amazing analysis, very informative for all of us.

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