The Steps to help you bring your startup idea to life
While the pathway to building a scaling business can be defined in steps & outcomes, building a startup company rarely goes in a straight line.
These processes are often sequential, however there may be considerable timespan overlap of what gets done during these phases. For example, based on learnings you may need to repeat some steps.
Define and validate your idea, so you can clearly communicate what you do, why you do it and for whom. This is a stage to identify prospective buyers, test your hypothesis, identify competitors. Be prepared to iterate and evolve your idea based on what you learn.
Know your best potential customer and what unique value you will deliver.
Clearly Define Your Concept: Who are you, what do you do, why do you do it?
Validate Your Idea: What pain are you solving? Who will be willing to spend money on your offering, and why? Will they be repeat buyers?
Define Your Business Model: How will your organization create and deliver its products/services, and sustain itself?
Understand Startup Costs: What will it take to get things off the ground through to launch?
Get Your Legal Ducks In a Row: Which legal business framework is best for your business? Are there any other legal or regulatory requirements you need to meet?
Based on what you have learned, begin building a simple solution to test. The goal is to define and create the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that reflects your Value Proposition.
This is a build and test stage. Listen to customers, test and iterate on your offering. They will help you find the best solution.
Design Your Product: Develop the initial features and functionalities of your product, using the core concept from the idea stage.
Create Go-To-Market Strategy: Create a plan to get, keep and grow your customer base.
Be Able To Tell Your Story: Telling your story clearly and doing it concisely is essential at this stage. Whether it’s a chance encounter in an elevator, a pitch competition, hiring your first employees, or a presentation for potential investors or customers, now is the time to develop and refine your business story.
Introduce your solution to the world. Validate all your previous assumptions. Iterate and expand the offering. Test assumptions for scaling sales. Focus on information gathering that will help you to fuel ongoing development and growth.
Work out Critical Path items, Planning, Identification of resources needed to grow.
Deploy Pilots or Beta versions to Refine your MVP: Leverage early adopter usage to validate product-market fit. Refine as necessary.
Build your Sales Funnel, Service Customers: Implement a formal process to take prospects from awareness to acquisition. Learn costs of acquisition. Work on servicing your customer for the long term. Keeping the customers that you acquire is essential.
Build the Team: Consider the cultural aspects of building a team. Early “many hat” employees will evolve during this phase.
Finding a path to scale the business means understanding sales strategies, team expansion and customer retention. Now you will build the necessary systems to support the evolving needs of the organization and its customers.
Ability to Identify and Add Resources to Scale. Consider new markets.
Release Expanded Functionality: Make product enhancements based on customer
feedback. Keep close track of competitor moves.
Aggressively Pursue Customers: Demonstrate business model and customer acquisition tactics. Consider new markets and additional channel partners to scale.
Talent Acquisition: Identify and hire key personnel around business and technical functions.
At each step, your business may require funding in order to reach key milestones. Early on, capital is used to create MVP and prototypes. Later, as customers signal positive buying habits, capital will be needed to ramp marketing and sales.
Investors like to invest in your company’s forward progress. Consider the capital you will need to reach key milestones (we often think about the next 12 months).
The Lean Startup
Disciplined Entrepreneurship
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