Startup Mistakes

People who have read my previous blog about entrepreneurship, thanks for revisiting. :)

Here I will present my views on the most important aspects of a startup which needs, a detailed attention.

In life "Learning from Mistakes" goes without saying, which obviously is seen more commonly in Startup Businesses. But the best strategy would be to learn from others mistakes. This means where others have made mistakes and lost money we could learn from their mistakes and save that money. But ofcourse there are innumerable mistakes that can still be made, but the most common ones could be overcome.

Legal:

• Structure of Business i.e Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, Corporation etc.
• Defining a Partnership Agreement without a detailed explanation. Entry and exit strategy should be defined.
• Handshake Deals, i don't mean it literally but a deal that is made without a complete description about the services to be offered.

Financial:

• Underestimating Operating Cost. Even if we are very careful in calculating operating costs there would certainly be other miscellaneous expenses which might add upto 20% to 30%. This over a period of time will surely show up.
• Mispricing Products or Services. i am sure this is the most important part of the Startup for obvious reasons. We try be different and unique in the market by under-pricing our products or services. There could be a logic of volume of business to be captured at one go but this might go wrong most often. An extensive market research is required to understand the Demand and Supply gap in the market and set the pricing. "Price your Product or Service at a point that reflects its value".

Marketing:

• Taking Strategy from Competitors. We keep watching our competitors, what they are doing, like their product updates or services, Website changes, Marketing Techniques etc., We have to resist the temptation and use our competitors as a source of ideas. Every Company operates differently from each other hence one must collect all these idea, filter them through our own priorities and needs. What is good for others might not be necessarily good for us.
• Over-Emphasizing Brand. Most startups are very obsessed with brand i.e making a brand name for themselves. While this is not wrong for early startup, marketing strategies should be more aggressive than branding. Branding can be achieved through aggressive marketing of the product or services.

Hiring:

• Right mix of People. To save operating costs we might have chosen people with less experience or fresher's. We might have a backing that we are talented enough to manage these people as we might have done in the past. This might prove to be a very costly move as these less experienced people might not share our vision, thereby costing our time managing them.
• Hiring someone to do a bit of everything. The "Jack of all Trades" approach is good for the owner or the founder but not for other functions of business. Each function of business should have specific specialists who can give their best to the role. This in turn improves the overall efficiency of the startup.

As i had mentioned in the beginning, there are innumerable possibilities of mistakes that could happen. Entrepreneurship is the art of taking right decisions at the right time. Finding a balance between theory and reality, making marketing and sales a top priority, buffering funding requirements are a few of the many factors that take the startup a long way.

Thank you for reading through this and i wish my startup friends and people who are passionate about Entrepreneurship all good luck and success.

I am waiting listen to your valuable feedback. Leave a comment below or tweet me @harimindi