Starting Your Own Startup - Steps, Guidelines & Tips
There are a million articles on the internet which talk about the perks of being an entrepreneur, what to do to advance your company, how to maintain the motivation level. While all that is necessary and true, once you decide to startup, there are some tiring things which you have to take care of before launching your startup. This article will try to cover a lot of the issues that you need to take care of prior to riding the entrepreneurship wave.
First comes deciding on a logo and a name for your company. It is common for young entrepreneurs to not realize the importance of this. Done right, this impacts hugely, how people perceive your brand. Keep in mind one thing here, the name and the logo need not talk about the product or service you are offering, rather it should be something which people remember easily and should give out a positive feeling as soon as they see it. For example look at Starbucks, neither their name nor their logo talk about coffee anywhere, still people can recognize a Starbucks outlet easily by the logo and the name kind of gets stuck in your head.
Image: pixabay
Once you have decided on the name and logo next comes registering your company. Now this can be a very tiring experience, if you don’t know what to do. It may even lead to a drop in your motivation levels if you are stuck in the registration process. It is best to outsource this. There are a number of companies which provide this kind of service. One such example is indiafilings.com.
Once you are done with the name and the logo, have a written business plan. The business plan must answer the following questions in detail:
Who we are?
What we intend to do?
Why do we want to do it?
How do we achieve our objective?
Next, get yourself a website. As soon as you start marketing your company, people would want to visit your website go get further information. Make sure your website is user-friendly and all information that you want to pass on to your customers is up there.
After that, get yourself an accountant. Now don’t go about hiring people. Remember; always try to keep your liabilities as low as possible. You can meet people who would be interested in working with you at Startup boot camps, entrepreneurship summits and even online. Do a little background check and get the one in your team who you are comfortable working with.
If you are a manufacturing company, make sure all parts of your operations are in place. At this point make sure all your operations are sustainable i.e. they cause minimum environmental pollution and don’t generate a lot of waste. As a startup you have the option of doing a lot of things right from the beginning only. Your business plan should be completely sustainable. This would help in reducing costs in the long run and will also build goodwill among future investors and customers.
While all other things are in process, take time out to do online courses on entrepreneurship, management, leadership, marketing and making businesses sustainable. These will help you develop insights which will help you think from different perspective before taking any decisions when the business starts. Besides, to grow as an entrepreneur you have to constantly keep learning. Once you start your company you won’t get much time to do these courses. So, it is best to spend time on these courses now only.
As you learn more about doing business through these courses, start a blog and write about the problem you are going to solve through your venture. Don’t mention your product anywhere, just talk in general terms. Get Facebook and Twitter IDs for your business and be active on them.
Get your business listed in various websites; this will help direct traffic to your webpage. One of the best is Yahoo directories.
Start talking to people about your business. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing technique. Talk about what problem you business is going to solve and how well it will do so.
Starting a company sure is not an easy thing. But to be aware of as many influencing factors as possible and marketing it right before the launch can be the key to your success.
This article has been authored by Shubhankar Biswal from XIMB,XUB
