Starting a startup from scratch. Where to start?

Posted by Auberon Waincvkloh on August 24th, 2022

We live in the era of digital technologies and startups. It is everywhere today. Advertising, scientific meetings, forums, social networks, and mass media. Almost everywhere you'll find a story about how a small group of people founded a project, and after a few years, it turned into a well-known innovative business. There are a lot of such stories with happy endings, which encourages doubting people to try to create their startup.

Today, more and more people want to launch their startup, hoping for success. The reasons for such actions are obvious. Ambitious people can realize their skills, knowledge, and unique ideas and become rich and famous. Someone is pursuing altruistic dreams of making the world a better place. But the essence does not change. Hundreds of new startups appear every day. The stories of many end before they begin. Most projects are closed within the first few years after the start. The reason is banal. Successful startup development is a complex process. It requires strength, knowledge, desire, and resources.

Many startups face difficulties that they cannot overcome. As a result, they fail. Many people do not even know where to start to properly launch their project to avoid many problems at the stages of its implementation. Let's focus on it in more detail.

You have decided to launch your project. You have a unique idea, desire, and initial resources. Where to start then? First, answer a few questions. Has anyone implemented the same idea before? If not, why not? Why is your idea needed? What problem does it solve?

To assess the relevance of your idea, it is not necessary to be a certified marketer. You can do it yourself. List the problems that your idea solves. Try to estimate how many people have these problems and describe them in detail (age, gender, location, income level). You'll determine the target audience of the project. Will people pay for your service or product?

Think about what technologies and solutions you need to implement the project. If your idea is unique and helps people, it may happen that no one has launched such a startup before, because it would be too expensive.

Evaluate your teamwork organization capabilities. The team is building a startup. A lot will depend on its effectiveness and interest. Today, startups use various task managers to manage a team and a project. The most popular of them are Slack, Trello, and Microsoft Teams. Each platform has advantages and disadvantages compared to competitors. For example, Slack has more than 2500 apps for integration. Thanks to them, you can create a single workspace for work taking into account the nuances of your business. Do you need to actively communicate with customers and process their requests? Slack SMS will solve these problems and increase communication to a new level!

Create a business plan. You reflect the philosophy of the project, the results of market research, the main stages of the project, the general terms of development, and a detailed budget. You also describe the monetization model of the application, the structure of the project team, and the application promotion plan. That's enough for a start. If you work effectively and do everything right, then you'll have a plan for further actions on your hands.