Expectations as a founders
What makes a good entrepreneur and a good idea? Some key questions to find out if you have what it takes!
80% of startup culture is the Founder. Therefore, one of the most important things that startup founders must do for their startups as a whole is to establish the tone of culture they want, and cultivate that culture in the startup.
Startup founders often focus on building products and gain market traction. In this single-minded pursuit, founders may miss out on paying the required attention to building the company culture. The moment they hire their first employee, the company culture has already begun taking shape.
1) What do you want the startup to be?
2) How do you talk to people outside about what it’s like to work for your startup?
Founder's Survival Budget
A Personal Survival Budget details your average monthly income (like your salary or benefits payments) minus all the costs and expenses you would incur in a typical month (like your rent, your utility bills and your monthly grocery bill). As the name suggests, this is a personal budget – not a business budget. This is to help you decide whether starting a business is the best option for you.
Working as Co-Founders
Things You Must Consider Before Becoming a Co-Founder.
1. Co-founder chemistry
2. Co-founder skill sets should be complementary
3. Co-founders should share the same vision (appetite for risk)
4. Co-founders exit strategy
5. Co-founders should discuss culture
Evaluating your startup idea
How to think about your idea. Even the best idea might not work for you.
Questions to answer-;
1. Is the idea worth doing?
2. Does it create real value?
3. Do you have the resources need to execute the idea?
4. Are you the right person to execute the idea?
An introduction to lean canvasing. Lean Canvas is a 1-page business plan template created by Ash Maurya that helps you deconstruct your idea into its key assumptions.
As an entrepreneur, one of the most important tasks you can perform is getting your idea(s) out from your head into a tangible format so that you can communicate that with others. The main objective with Lean Canvas is making it as actionable as possible while staying entrepreneur-focused.
Competition Anaylsis
A competitive analysis is a critical part of your company marketing plan. With this evaluation, you can establish what makes your product or service unique--and therefore what attributes you play up in order to attract your target market. It's an essential tactic for finding out what your competitors are doing and what kind of threat they present to your financial well-being.
Memory performance and tooling
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Talking to users
The truth about talking to users; The first rule of user research: talk to users. The second rule of user research: don’t believe those who say you can’t talk to users.
For early-stage startups, it's easy to think that you can’t do much user research because you haven’t built anything and therefore don’t have any users to talk to yet. So instead, some founders will start with spending a lot of time and resources on developing the prototype or product before talking to anyone. So you have to really know your market/industry to evaluate if it is actually a worthwhile business opportunity to pursue.
Building an MVP
MVP, short for Minimum Viable Product, is exactly what it says on the label: the product in its smallest, least featureful avatar that has just the basics, and only those functionalities, that demonstrate your product. MVP helps in testing, designing, and delivering the final product. The purpose of an MVP is to launch a product quickly, based on your idea, with a small budget. This approach allows you to collect user’s feedback for the primary product and include it in future iterations. With the help of an MVP, one can find the right audience, pull the ideas based on experience, and save time.
Setting KPi's and goals
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable metric that reflects how well an a startup is achieving its stated goals and objectives. Understanding how KPIs are measurable and demonstrate how effectively a startup is achieving key objectives.
Launching your idea
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Types of business models
Ensuring that your product fits the needs of the market is only one part of starting a successful business. The other key ingredient is figuring out how you’re going to make money. This is where your business model comes into play. At its core, your business model is a description of how your business makes money. It’s an explanation of how you deliver value to your customers at an appropriate cost.
Startup Finance
So you've come up with an idea for a business? Congratulations! Working out how to finance your start-up begins with knowing how much money you are going to need and where to find it. You also need to understand what the different types of finance can offer a start-up, so that you can get the right financial mix for your business.
Startup Pricing
Pricing a product or a service is more of an art than a science, which is probably why so many businesses have trouble with it. Setting a price for a product is one of the most important decisions a startup can make. But all too often it’s treated as an afterthought. Startups, in particular, have a habit of setting their price low to attract customers and never raising it, or keeping a feature free long after it’s clear people will pay.
Startup growth & Pivoting
A pivot is essentially a shift in business strategy to test a new approach regarding a startup’s business model or product after receiving direct or indirect feedback. While the MVP is often extremely minimalistic, the feedback from the initial group of test customers helps entrepreneurs learn what’s working, understand what isn’t, and figure out what direction they should go.
Investor Hat
Basic understanding of how investors measure startups
Funding as ladder
There are a wide variety of very different types of funding for startups. Some are very specialised in the stages and funding rounds they will invest at. Think of funding as a ladder and not an A or B menu list.
As your startup grows different sources of capital will be more advantageous and valuable to fueling that next level of growth. Understanding these differences will be invaluable for an efficient fundraising campaign and targeting the right investors at each raise.
Why Investors and VCs say no
Raising capital for a startup isn’t easy. You’re more likely to hear the success stories, and the unicorns that venture capitalists said “yes” to during on funding rounds. But 99% of the day-to-day reality of a VC's time is spent on saying no.
Bootstrapping as an option
Bootstrap financing is probably one of the best and most inexpensive routes a founder can explore when raising capital. Learn how to utilise unused opportunities that can be found within your own startup and networks.