If we take a minute to think about it, using the term “launch” is an incredibly fortunate way to describe the opening of one startup. Of course, the first thing that crosses everyone’s mind upon hearing is a shuttle launch.
Sure, these vessels may be the technical wonders of this age, but if we allow ourselves even the smallest mistakes during the launch or put the shuttle on the wrong trajectory, their first flight usually turns to catastrophe.
Opening the doors of your startup is really no different. You need to be prepared, you need to eliminate mistakes, and you need to know where you’re heading or your company runs into the danger of crashing and burning.
So, let us take a look then at a couple of simple yet powerful ways to prepare for a startup launch and set your company on a healthy foundation.
Educate yourself about the matter at hand
As Benjamin Franklin once famously said, “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” Fast forward 200 years and you will see these words still hold much truth – especially considering that running a business involves a lot of facets and factors that are not necessarily connected with the core activities of your startups.
Enrolling yourself in some form of corporate training, and learning more about leadership, marketing, and other important topics will help you get a much better grasp of the business world and refine your initial ideas if you see they don’t align with the real-life market demands. For instance, if you pursue a marketing course that teaches skills vital to the business world. Among these skills are the ability to communicate effectively orally or in writing, pitch ideas and present displays in a board meeting, and interpret computer and system data.
Write down your business plan
Putting aside this is the only feasible way to secure proper financing, having a detailed business plan also helps the owners to set priorities, break down the long-term goals into immediate small-scale tasks, manage cash, get relevant metrics and set future milestones, and develop accountability.
It is a powerful tool that gives owners the development roadmap and helps them make a necessary course correction.
To meet these goals, a business plan should cover the following topics:
- Executive summary
- Overview and objectives
- Products and services
- Market opportunities
- Sales and marketing
- Competitive analysis
- Operations
- Management team
- Financial analysis
Build a flexible and scalable infrastructure
During the first of running a startup, your company needs to be very agile and able to easily respond to all market openings. In other words, the startup needs to be scalable.
The easiest way to do that is to set your infrastructure in the cloud. Of course, even if you are inexperienced with this type of technology, you can always follow the same pattern and find third-party help.
For instance, if you plan on adopting Amazon Web Services, you will be able to easily hire a professional Super Admins cloud management team to run this asset for you. This logic can be applied to all other facets giving you an unprecedented level of flexibility.
Put the company on healthy foundations
Even though your company needs to be fast and nimble, in order to succeed, it also needs to have a strong footing.
And by that, we mean all legal matters, deciding on the most appropriate business structure, licenses and permits, financial requirements and branding specifics need to be taken care of with due diligence. Failing to comply with these critical necessities can cause you a lot of problems in the long run.
However, if we had to extrapolate one thing you should give the greatest attention to that would be ignorance of the applicable tax laws in your central and outsourced departments.
Build your team and choose your vendors
Some people think these issues can be settled as you go along, but failing to establish strong relations with prospective talents and influential industry vendors and tying them to the fortune of your company from the get-go can seriously impede its development.
With proper training and development plan, your first batch of employees can potentially fill in the executive roles further down the road. In the case of vendors, establishing close connections prior to the launch opens up the possibility for collaboration, beneficial long-term agreements, shared marketing actions, and an advantage over the competition.
Develop long-term content and SEO strategy
Both these marketing approaches are, in their own terms, critical for the development of your startup. As for the SEO, 71.3% of searches result in a click on an organic result on the SERP – a far more efficient result than you get with PPC which puts effective startup SEO at the top of the list of your priorities.
Quality content, on the other hand, will help your startup attract visitors that are not yet interested in your products and services and turn it into a relevant educational hub. Both these strategies need to work in unison and be developed before the launch of the startup.
We hope these few considerations will help you put your startup on a strong foundation and make its eventual launch day as streamlined and laid back as possible. People like to say that good preparation makes half the job done and they are right.
If something is broken from its inception you will hardly be able to put it back together as time goes by. So, make sure that is not the case and set your startup for one very mundane an