Strategy
BI India lists the steps to launch the startup of your dreams:
·Live in the future: Most of us live in the past or the present. However, that isn’t the way to create a great startup. Great startups are based on two types of ideas– obvious and non-obvious and hard.
·Ask what the world needs: Ask yourself what is missing in the world now. More importantly what is missing from your life now?
·Write it down: No matter how smart you get, you will never remember all your thoughts. Write down your conversations, observations, and shower thoughts that are worth following up on. Write or lose them.
·Make a blueprint: IF you create a prototype and make your ideas physical, your ideas will stay with you. Most people will stop right here. So if you do this, you are already ahead of the curve.
·Show the prototype to 100 people: Now you have to find out people who will critique your prototype. Ideally, these can be people you know and strangers. Why 100? Because you need a breadth of perspective and hopefully a pattern to recognize from all the feedback.
·Iterate: Although a few people will get it right on the first try, odds are you won’t. Prepare to do everything from scratch.
·Find a co-founder. Find another person who will pour their life into your project because it will change the world.
·Register your business. Split equity. Get a lawyer and register your company.
·Look for funding: Unless you have enough savings to build version one, go find an investor.
·Launch: By the time there is a bit of usefulness in your product, launch it. Extra features, better interface, faster load time and other optimizations probably won’t save it.
·Follow up with users. Are users coming back? Find out why they are not.
· Launch again. Launch as many times as it takes. At some point, if at least a few dozen people are coming back on their own, you probably made something valuable.
· Get to 1,000 users. This may not seem like a lot, but the first 1,000 users will show the weaknesses of what you have built. You probably will have to recruit them manually. How manually? Take their computer and open your website for them. Whatever it takes.
· Grow. If you grow at least 5% a week, within 4 years you will get to 25 million users. In other words, you will be one of the largest startups in the world.
·Success – Now you can IPO, sell, or stay private by convincing investors that there is a bigger liquidity event coming.
Image credit: Funders and Founders