Tips for Start-ups

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If I were to write a post with tips for Start-ups, I don’t think I could get much better than Neil Patel’’s recent post - 10 Business Mistakes That Will Nearly Break You… Literally. The first 5 are especially spot on. My favorite:

2. Get Out of Your Cave
Do you have an idea of where you want to take your business? I hope you don’t because your vision is probably different than your customers.

You have to get out of the mindset of “I want” because it doesn’t really matter what you want. All that matters is what your customers want.

Start surveying your customers to figure out what they want and more importantly understand why they want it. This will help you create a product where customers would be very disappointed if your product or service didn’t exist. Having this will help you make more money.

I certainly don’t have a list of things it takes to succeed, but one thing I generally recommend to entrepreneurs interested in starting a company is you need to take action.

Planning is fine, but without action there is no way you can succeed. Plus, planning only goes so far and too much planning likely won’t help you.

The way to learn what the market wants is to dive into it and figure out what works, what doesn’t, what is needed, and what isn’t needed. Tweak and continue on your quest. This leads to another point by Neil:

Agility is what you have that a bigger company doesn’t.

Act. Reflect and get feedback. Revise. Repeat.