What are the most important things you can to do make your business successful? Everyone has their own list. I’m sure that textbooks may have their own list but here’s mine.
Go fast
Faster time-to-market means earlier success or earlier failure. Either of those are preferable to spending (wasting) lots of valuable time and money. Getting yourself out into the market earlier also lets you share your journey to success with your community of followers and your customers. It also allows you to get early feedback from your customers about what’s really going to be important. If you’re a software company, the best advice I can give you is to release early, release often.
Get to know your customers
Start talking to your customers as early as you can. Create a customer community and get them engaged with each other. So many companies do their product development behind closed doors. But the more you get out of the office and talk to your customers, the better you understand their problem and their needs. Your primary goal should be to solve their problems.
Get to know your competition
It’s just as important to know the other businesses in your space as it is to know your customers. Get involved in an small, intimate industry group. Or, if you can’t find one, create one. You can learn just as much about your market from your competitors as you can from your customers. You might also find that you can form partnerships that will help all of you grow your businesses.
Form partnerships
No business is an island. You can’t be everything to everyone, especially as a small business. Partnerships allow you to extend your reach beyond your grasp. They also allow you to create more complete or complimentary product offerings to your customers. Good partnerships also help you get in front of more customers and more customers usually translates into more revenue.
Provide excellent customer service
Making your customers happy is basically a combination of providing a product that resonates with them and helping them use the product well. But if you have a product that is similar to many others in your market, the best way to differentiate yourself is to provide outstanding customer service.
That’s my list of five critical startup business practices. What am I missing? What resonates most with you?
photo credit, valerie everett
