October 2022

Five Ways to Grow Your Startup Business

Like anything else in life or business, you have to put in the time if you’re looking to reap the benefits.

No matter what kind of business you run, you’re going to want to increase your sales and grow your revenue. There isn’t an easy one-size-fits-all business growth strategy for small business owners. However, this article focuses on the key strategies you can use to give your startup business the best chance of growing.

There isn’t an easy one-size-fits-all business growth strategy for small business owners

Understanding Startups

Startups are businesses that want to disrupt industries and change the world—and do it all at scale. Startup founders dream of giving society something it needs but hasn’t created yet—generating eye-popping valuations that lead to an initial public offering (IPO) and an astronomical return on investment.

On a high level, a startup works like any other company. A group of employees work together to create a product that customers will buy. What distinguishes a startup from other businesses, though, is the way a startup goes about doing that.

Regular companies duplicate what’s been done before. A startup aims to create an entirely new template.

Five Ways to Grow Your Startup Business

Build a Sales Funnel

The first way to quickly grow your business is by building a sales funnel. Think of a sales funnel as a customer’s journey. When they enter your business or visit your website, they’re at the top of the funnel. When they buy something or sign up for a service, they’ve successfully gone through the funnel. You should try to come up with ways to move people through the funnel to make a sale. This can include offering a discount or getting their contact information and sending them updates on your business. Remember that every sales funnel needs to be carefully conceptualized before it’s created.

Acquire New Customers

This is the most obvious and the most focused upon by business owners, managers, and the marketers they charge with execution. Unfortunately, it’s also the most challenging and expensive aspect of revenue growth. Regardless of the difficulty and expense, bringing on new customers is the lifeblood of any business since with growth and expansion comes more options for the business to make its desired impact. By focusing your customer engagement strategy and meeting customers where they are with effective content, you can find and attract interested customers. And loyalty programs and personalized messages can keep those customers interested, and your business growing.

Increase Customer Retention

It’s not enough to just get new customers for your business. You also need to keep your existing customers coming back. When you increase customer retention, you’re building customer loyalty, which can increase sales. Considering it costs five times as much to get a new customer than it does to keep a current one, focusing on retaining customers means your business won’t spend money on something that isn’t a guaranteed investment.

You can increase your customer retention by prioritizing customer service, creating a customer loyalty program, engaging with customers on social media, or launching an email campaign.

Build a Bigger Online Presence

Even if you don’t have an online business, expanding your online brand presence is crucial to getting your product in front of more eyes, especially if your product sells directly to consumers.

The key to building an online presence lies in the consistent posting of content. Whether you share content via a blog, newsletter, or Twitter account, posting regularly will help your followers stay interested and engaged with your brand. Whichever online platform you use to promote your business, make sure the content you post is consistent with your brand’s identity.

Form Strategic Partnerships

Entering a strategic partnership with another business can give you the chance to reach a broader network of customers or align growth with strategic goals in your business plan. You may even form a strategic partnership with a vendor to help expand your business. Whatever type of partnership you form, you must manage business relationships and maintain effective vendor relationships.

Sometimes, acquiring other businesses is a very quick way to grow your own business. If you can find competitors or businesses in other industries that would complement your own, you could use them as platforms to scale fast.

Conclusion

Like anything else in life or business, you have to put in the time if you’re looking to reap the benefits. Don’t focus on the short-term outcome of your work. Look to the long term. Build sincere value and look to help your customers. Genuinely care. That should be the foundation. After that, it’s simply a matter of taking action and putting in the work to scale.

What is Market Fit and Why Does It Matter?

Like in cards, when it comes to starting a business, an entrepreneur must know when to hold them and when to fold them.

One of the biggest differences between successful startups and those that fail is how soon they begin confirming that real demand exists for the product they’re offering. If you want to make sure you’re in the minority of startups experiencing consistent growth, give yourself the best start possible and make sure you have market fit before shipping the product. Keep reading to learn how to ensure a strong product-market fit.

*Product-market fit describes a scenario in which a company’s target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company’s product*

What is Product-Market Fit?

The most simplified definition of product-market fit is in the name: your product fits into the market, is where it is supposed to be, and you grow your business because of it.

Product-market fit is when your customers become your salespeople. In business, it is a magical moment when three things happen:

Existing users recognize your product’s value.
They tell others about their great experience with the product.
Your company replicates the excellent experience for the new users.

After all, the end goal of likely every business is to provide enough value to customers that they become your advocates and help you grow your customer base.

Product-market fit is a well-known idea in the startup community. It refers to a situation in which a company’s target consumers buy, use, and tell others about its product in sufficient numbers to keep it growing and profitable. It is the degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand. Product-market fit happens when you successfully identify your target customer and serve them with the right product.

How to Measure Product-Market Fit?

In theory, you may test product/market fit through surveys that determine what proportion of your consumers consider your new product to be a must-have. However, product-market fit is more about an in-depth and realistic grasp of who your consumers are and how they feel about you and your product than it is about hypothetical statistics and percentages.

Is it creating organic growth, where people spread the word on their own? Are people willing to pay for your product? If they are, you have a product-market fit.

Your product/service will most likely satisfy a tiny part of the market as a startup or early-stage firm. If you want to acquire this knowledge in the first place, you must first establish a relationship with your consumers and communicate to them (over and over again).

Who is Responsible for Creating a Product-Market Fit?

We usually link product-market fit with product management and marketing, but, in reality, achieving it is a company-wide effort. All departments contribute to the company’s achievement of this significant milestone, including sales, business development, support, and finance.

The Importance of Product-Market Fit

Paying attention to market fit, sometimes called product-market fit, is what keeps us from selling dentures to people with teeth or snow shoes in the deserts of Rajasthan.

Like in cards, when it comes to starting a business, an entrepreneur must know when to hold them and when to fold them. In this regard, we cannot overstress the importance of product-market fit for entrepreneurs.

Product-market fit is important because, until that point, you don’t know whether or not what you are building solves a real problem that a large enough market has. Without clarity on this, you could continue investing in building something that is not commercially viable. Worse still, you could burn cash by hiring prematurely or investing in sales and marketing that will not generate a return (premature scaling is often cited as one of the main reasons startups fail).

The effort of confirming product-market fit has several upsides, many of which go beyond avoiding the time, expense, and raw pain of backing a poor idea. Benefits include:

You gain the opportunity to make changes and serve a real need in the market.
You gain a valuable tool that you can use to attract investment.
Confirming your assumptions is great for morale and can motivate you to keep going when things get tough.
If you have an in-demand product, you will have an easier time finding business funding that can help you accelerate your company.

*when it comes to starting a business, an entrepreneur must know when to hold them and when to fold them.*

The Downsides of Poor Market Fit

Failing to challenge your assumptions is highly risky. So, here are some downsides of a poor market fit.

Burning money and wasting time: However passionate you may be about your product, the sad truth is that potential users may not feel the same. Learning that sooner rather than later saves you resources (time, as well as the treasure) to pursue a project that can succeed. Give yourself that opportunity.
Wasted potential: Your product might have been transformative with just a few adjustments. However, by not doing the research and analysis to ensure a good market fit, you deny yourself the information you need to make vital changes (which might be small) to your product or target market that could lead to astonishing success.
Lack of a clear business case: The startup market is highly competitive. While it’s hard to quantify, there are potentially thousands of competitors for each segment of the market who are hungry for the funding they need to put rockets under their enterprise. So, when you go to an investor, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Instead, have real research in your pocket that shows you’re a winner, or be prepared to lose out to your better-prepared competitors.

Conclusion

Building a business is hard. Knowing you’re on the right path is motivating. When it’s good, it’s good. You can see your way to the finish line, believe in yourself, and have every confidence that your hard work will pay off.

We hope you found this guide helpful. Now it’s time to turn that knowledge into business results.

Skills Required to be a Successful Entrepreneur

Developing entrepreneurial skills can lead to developing several types of skill sets together.

Entrepreneurs play a fundamental role in any economy, using the skills and initiative necessary to anticipate needs and bring good new ideas to market. Since there is so much at stake when starting and growing a successful business, there are specific skills that an entrepreneur usually needs to hone or acquire to be successful.

Successful entrepreneurs have mastery over both hard and soft skills. Hard skills like accounting, marketing, and financial planning are critical for running and managing a business. On the other hand, soft skills like communication, problem-solving, and decision-making help you scale up your business. Mastery of entrepreneur skills requires practice and a dedicated learning plan.

Below, we highlight seven such skills required to be a successful entrepreneur.

Who is an Entrepreneur?

An entrepreneur is typically an individual who creates a new business, plays an active role in its operations, assumes most of the financial risk, and enjoys most of its success. The process of creating a new business – often driven by new ideas for products or services – is known as entrepreneurship.

He is a person who pursues an opportunity, often commercially driven, to bring a new product or service to market with limited resources and high risk. The process of creating a new business is entrepreneurship, also defined as organizing limited resources to capitalize on a business opportunity.

What are Entrepreneurial Skills?

Entrepreneurial skills are those associated with being an entrepreneur, although anyone can develop them. Being an entrepreneur usually means starting and building your own successful business, but people with entrepreneurial skills can thrive within larger organizations, too.

Entrepreneurial skills can encompass a range of various skill sets like technical skills, leadership and business management skills, and creative thinking. You can apply entrepreneurial skills to many different job roles and industries. Thus, developing entrepreneurial skills can lead to developing several types of skill sets together.

7 Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have

1. Communication Skills

Every entrepreneur needs to be an effective communicator. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or running a Fortune 500 company, you need to understand how to communicate effectively to all stakeholders and potential stakeholders that touch the business.

Whether through verbal communication during meetings or sending reports and messages through emails about the project, entrepreneurs require superior written and verbal communication skills. Apart from communication skills, entrepreneurs must be excellent listeners to understand the project requirements and discussion during project meetings.

2. Business Management Skills

Regardless of whether you like it or not, you will always need to manage your company.

Business management skills are traits an entrepreneur must have to run a business and ensure all business goals are met. Entrepreneurs with this skill set can oversee and manage the operations of different departments because they possess a good understanding of the functions of each department. Business management skills include multitasking, delegating responsibilities, and making critical business decisions. Often, entrepreneurs achieve success in their businesses through their sheer strength of will.

3. Sales Skills

It is the most crucial entrepreneurial skill you need to have. A startup cannot survive without selling something to its customers. Entrepreneurs who develop skills in sales will learn how to stay on top of a competitive market, regardless of industry.

Learning sales helps entrepreneurs develop tenacity and deep comprehension of their business process. Developing sales skills helps entrepreneurs make necessary failures, climb the learning curve, and gain the insights required to do well in business.

4. Time Management Skills

Time management: Among other soft skills, time management skills – such as prioritizing, scheduling, task management, and delegation – are of utmost importance to being a successful entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs with time management and organizational skills understand different ways to prioritize tasks and avoid procrastination.

If you can manage your time well, you may find it easier to be more productive and more likely to finish your projects by the deadline. Developing time management skills will help you focus on time-sensitive tasks and reduce wasted time.

5. Leadership Skills

As an entrepreneur, you lead.

Being able to inspire colleagues, empower the workforce and lead from the front requires excellent leadership skills. Exemplary leaders lead by example and can take a leadership role and work as a part of a team. Entrepreneurs with leadership skills motivate their employees, manage operations, and delegate tasks to reach the business goal.

Entrepreneurs also need to be able to train and manage the people they add to their team. When business owners learn how to encourage, develop and motivate staff, it boosts morale and keeps the company moving in the right direction.

6. Persistence

Persistence is a defining trait of successful entrepreneurs and one of the top qualities of the famous success iceberg. This quality helps entrepreneurs handle rejections, stress, and slow progress.

Persistent entrepreneurs are able to watch their ideas grow from nothing to the business they always envisioned. Entrepreneurship is not an easy route, and it requires a tremendous amount of patience to be able to see any results. Patience and persistence are keys to success for any entrepreneur, as well as learning how to view failures as valuable learning moments.

7. Networking Skills

Another valuable entrepreneurial skill is networking. Building a strong network of potential clients and business partners is what enables your business to grow. Networking allows you to search out and take advantage of opportunities you might not have had access to otherwise. Entrepreneurs need to learn how to develop mutually beneficial relationships with others. Networking is not all about what you can get from the other person. Rather, it is based on good communication and an exchange of value.

Through a solid network, entrepreneurs can meet professionals to fund their ideas, access professional business expertise, and get feedback on their new venture or idea.

***“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” – Albert Einstein***

Importance of Entrepreneurial Skills in the Workplace

With the job market constantly changing, one should stay up to date on the top in-demand skills of the market and strive to learn or improve on them. Here are a few reasons why entrepreneurial skills are important:

Ensures adaptability: Life skills make you more adaptable by preparing you to face difficulties and overcome them.
Helps deal with failure: With life skills, you develop the ability to recover from failures and view them as learning opportunities.
Assists in team collaboration: Mastering these skills will help you work collaboratively with others which will help build team collaboration.
Increases accountability: Life skills teach you to be accountable for all your actions. It encourages new ideas and helps you stand for yourself.

How to Make a Fundraising Presentation?

The flow of the presentation is vital for striking a chord with investors.

The fundraising presentation is one of the primary documents essential to any early-stage company fundraising process. The time spent with potential investors becomes most effective if you have an impactful fundraising presentation.

The flow of the presentation is vital for striking a chord with investors and displaying the narrative of the business. Going through a successful pitch deck slide by slide is one of the most effective ways to learn how to build a flow.

There is no single formula for a pitch deck. Otherwise, startup founders wouldn’t spend so much time banging their heads against walls trying to get them just right. However, we have listed some ideas that you can apply immediately so that your next investor presentation leaves you – and your investor – smiling and happy.

The fundraising presentation is one of the primary documents essential to any early-stage company fundraising process.

Know your audience

Knowing your audience is key to good communication. At a startup, you will pitch to multiple audiences: customers, partners, recruits, and investors. Although you may be able to reuse some content between these audiences, you’ll need to make sure you devote time to a slide deck that focuses on the investor perspective.

Ask yourself:

Who exactly is my potential investor – and what do they want?

What do I want to achieve – how will I sell our investment opportunity?

How can I hook people – by grabbing their attention early on?

What is my takeaway message – the one that I want them to remember afterward?

Define and refine your investment story

The way you frame your investment story influences how an investor sees you. Most successful fundraisers craft a compelling story around their strategy and tell it passionately. According to Forbes, the perfect selling story involves being relatable, detailing a conflict, presenting the resolution, and demonstrating results. The investors need to understand why your opportunity is special and what makes it stand out from others.

Structure your presentation like a story

The best fundraising presentations are ones where you take the investors on a journey. A simple structure – with a clear beginning, middle and end – demonstrates the command of your own story. It also helps investors quickly grasp what you do.

But remember, all you’re trying to do with the pitch deck is get their “greed glands” flowing. If you do that, there will be plenty of opportunities to give them more details. If you overwhelm them with too much detail at this point, they may miss the big picture.

Make sure you are ready

The best way to communicate your business to investors is to know your business!

Investors get frustrated by presenters who avoid, second-guess or provide scrambled answers to questions. Remember that it is their job to ask questions and be critical. We recommend that you prepare for the Q&A session as much as you do for the fundraising presentation itself. Prepare your answers and rehearse delivering them confidently together as a team – the last thing you want is your team being surprised by each other’s answers.

Make a good impression

Impressions are everything – investors’ perception of your team when you are with them is what matters.

Apart from preparing the presentation, you should also prepare yourself and the team. Remember that nonverbal communication can be just as important as what is said.

So, do extensive rehearsals on camera with the team so they are investor-ready. During the presentation, pay attention to what you do when your colleagues speak.

Look engaged and interested – show that you are as interested in your investors as you want them to be in you.

Investors essentially buy a piece of the company with their investment and some qualities acts as a deciding factor for Funding.

What Do Investors Look For In Startups?

Investors essentially buy a piece of the company with their investment. Here are some qualities investors look for in a startup that acts as deciding factors for funding.

Objective and Problem Solving: The offering of any startup should be differentiated to solve a unique customer problem or meet specific customer needs. Ideas or products that are patented show high growth potential for investors.
Management & Team: The passion, experience, and skills of the founders and the management team to drive the company forward are equally crucial deciding factors for investors.
Market Landscape: Mention the market size, obtainable market share, product adoption rate, historical and forecasted market growth rates, and macroeconomic drivers for the market you plan to target in the funding proposal.
Scalability & Sustainability: Startups should showcase the potential to scale shortly, along with a sustainable and stable business plan. They should also consider barriers to entry, imitation costs, growth rate, and expansion plans.
Customers & Suppliers: In the funding proposal, state a clear identification of your buyers and suppliers. Consider customer relationships, stickiness to your product, vendor terms, and existing vendors.
Competitive Analysis: Highlight the true picture of competition and other players in the market working on similar things in the proposal. There can never be an apple-to-apple comparison but highlighting the service or product offerings of similar players in the industry is important.
Sales & Marketing: No matter how good your product or service may be, if it does not find any end-use, it is no good. Consider things like a sales forecast, targeted audiences, product mix, conversion and retention ratio, etc.
Financial Assessment: A detailed financial business model that showcases cash inflows over the years, investments required key milestones, break-even points, and growth rates. Assumptions used at this stage should be reasonable and mentioned in the proposal.
Exit Avenues: A startup showcasing potential future acquirers or alliance partners becomes a valuable decision parameter for the investor. Initial public offerings, acquisitions, and subsequent rounds of funding are all examples of exit options.