Fear of Failure is the most prominent reason people don’t pursue their dreams and aspirations, and it’s not entirely unreasonable.
Because almost 90% of the startups FAIL.
But why and how can you avoid that?
That’s what we are going to discuss...
#1 - Not Focusing on Customers
Startups are market-driven.
According to a recent study, 42% of startups fail because they fail to develop a product that meets the market need. It is because they focus on building the product, not on the customers.
Your product is important. But it’s your customers who purchase your product is more important and your product matching the need of those customers is even more important.
If you want your startup to succeed, your only goal is to solve a problem for them; your customers.
Nothing else.
Focus on them.
#2 - Business Model Problem
Entrepreneurs assume that because they have built an excellent product, website, or service, customers will be waiting in queues and knocking their doors. They get too optimistic about customer acquisition.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
You might get your first 100 customers or easily through word-of-mouth or your network. But after that, when it comes to scaling, it gets tougher and tougher and that’s when it becomes a problem.
Your customer acquisition cost should always be less than the lifetime value of the customer. Unfortunately, in many cases, the cost of acquiring the customer is higher than the lifetime value of that customer.
But you cannot stop acquiring new customers. Without new customers, a business cannot grow. You got to get those customers to spend more, and when it doesn’t happen, things go south quickly.
That’s why you got to focus on your customer’s lifetime value and the maximum you can spend to acquire that customer. And use them as a benchmark.
You should focus on how to acquire customers without spending more than their lifetime value and how to get those customers to spend more than your cost of acquisition.
That can save your business.
#3 - Not Hiring the Right Team
The right team is the key to your startup success. Hiring the right team for your startup is a challenge. And it’s something many businesses fail to get right.
You need a team that believes in your vision, idea, and can do what it takes to ship the product or deliver the project.
Hiring the first one you interview because you don’t want to say “no” or hiring your BFF or the one who’s resume was looking good isn’t going to help you.
To hire the best team, you should have a clear idea of
- Who you need to hire?
- Do you need generalists or specialists?
- Do you need an experienced person or someone with great potential?
- What do you expect from them?
- What do you want them to deliver?
- What kind of results are you expecting from them?
- How will you know when you’ve found the right one?
- Who’s your ideal candidate?
- What are the values and qualities you look for?
When you have clear answers to these questions, you can hire the best team.
#4 - Poor Marketing
Startups focus on products.
You focus on the features, design, and getting it all right. You spend long hours and work hard hours to make the product better. And when the product is ready to launch, that’s when they face the harsh fact.
No one else knows about the product.
Because you didn’t market it, you haven’t told anyone about it. No one knows what it is, what it does, and why you created. You cannot sell something people don’t know about.
You need to create awareness about the problem you are solving. You need to tell them why it is important to solve and how a solution could impact the lives of your customers. So that people are sufficiently interested in a solution.
And when you introduce your product as the solution, people can recognize its benefits and will be considering to buy it.
No matter what your product or service is, you should make sure you aren’t making the four mistakes mentioned above.
No comments:
Post a Comment