How To Start a Startup In 5 Phases To Follow
How to start a startup – You’re probably familar with company startups in Big-Tech like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple. How to start a startup from some of the world’s experts. This is the 5 phases you have to follow and succed in this industry. Lets start begin!
Product Discussion
Imagine you’ve been saving for a while or you take a loan from the bank to build your next restaurant business. The first thing that comes to your mind is how the restaurant will look like. You go to an architect or interior designer and ask him/her to design your restaurant.
A couple of days go by, and the designer comes back to you and gives you a handwritten paper that explains how your restaurant will look like. That’s not what you are expecting, isn’t it? But still, there are some people when they got their idea, and they just boom and execute the idea right away, and that’s not the correct thing to do.
To start a startup you have to be very detailed and specific about your business. In terms of what is the features and benefits that you will give to your customers, and that’s the big reason why the product discussion is very important to do.
Competitor Analysis & Unique Selling Proposition
Once your product is defined in detail about what features and benefits you are giving to your clients, now it’s time to do competitor analysis. You have to know how your competitors are doing out there. In the same manner, you have to know what your competitors offer. to their customers in terms of features and benefits, And more importantly, from that point you can come up with your very own unique selling proposition.
There is a story about a salesman trying to sell a brand new SUV to a group of people. But, most of his audience comments that some other brands already do the same thing with your product. or they do have different SUV with the same comfort and benefit with what his offering. But the salesman smartly replies that this is the only SUV with a fully automated self-driving mechanism available on the market today. That’s important to know how to start a startup by your unique selling proposition before entering the market .
Well Written Business Requirements Document
From product discussion to start a startup, now you have a list of features that you want to be available on your product. It’s time to go one level deeper for each feature. We have to turn each feature into a well-written document in user story format. A little bit about user story this kind of document format so business people who often come with the business requirement. Technical people who often take that business requirement and make it available in the product can easily understand what written inside the document. We have another video about user story format in more detail if you want to learn more about it.
Let’s say you want to have a signup feature inside your product, where people can come to your product and register an account. You have to be very specific about how they can create their account. Can they signup using their google account? Or can they signup using their Facebook account? Or do they need to fill in some specific information to register an account? Not only that you also have to be very specific when something unexpected happens. For example, when user tries to signup with an existing email that has already been registered inside your system before, how would your product handle this specific situation?
Once you defined all scenarios that might happen on each feature, you can use this information later when you start building the prototype.
Defined Ideal Customer
Now you have all your business requirements documents ready, now it’s time to define how your ideal customer is. Imagine you have linkedin page opened up in front of your computer, and you see a job post. They are looking for a digital marketing position with this specific age range, this specific education etc. You can use the same analogy when you try to define your ideal customer. Say you are looking for a group of people with this specific age range, this specific occupation, this specific salary range etc.
We will use what you defined as your ideal customer later down the road to find group of people that fit in your criteria when we start doing product market fit process.
Project Timeline & Budget
Based on all business requirements documents that you have from previous steps. It’s more than easy to plan out the development process in terms of what you will be working on your first month, second month etc. By the end of planning session you will have specific project timeline and from the timeline it directly tell you what is the budget to prepare, develop, building and maintain the product.
Let’s do a Recap of what you will get from the start a startup in preparation phase:
- Detailed business requirements documents that explain all your features in details and later will use when you start building the prototype
- Well-defined ideal customer that later be used when we start product market fit process.
- Specified project timeline of what and when certain feature will be available inside the product.
- Budget for preparing, develop, building and maintain the product
To get more popular information about startup, check others article in Blankontech.