The Real First Steps When You’re Ready to Start Your Own Business
It’s all fun and games talking about starting your own business – until you have to do it. Suddenly, you’re at a loss for where to begin.
Most business advice skips the practical, messy realities and jumps straight into vision boards and mission statements. What you need to know in your first few weeks is an emphasis on ideation, customer acquisition, or at least how your plan will go about acquiring customers is threefold: validation, positioning, and finding your customers. Get these wrong or not work towards them and you’ll find yourself out of savings in no time.
Get your idea validated before building it
New entrepreneurs often make the mistake of building something no one wants. It’s a rather obvious idea to avoid, yet it happens all the time.
Instead of making your logo and LLC, you should validate your idea with real potential paying clients – though not your friends who will tell you nice things about it. Before you even create anything, get into the minds of those who might benefit from what you’re doing. What’s their current problem? How are they explaining their pain? If you don’t get information suggesting they’re suffering from something they’re currently trying to solve, then you have a problem.
You don’t need to do market research with surveys and focus groups; it’s as informal as a conversation with people in focus groups on social media (think Facebook groups, subreddits for your idea, or LinkedIn posts). Put it out there to see if anyone bites – or doesn’t – either way, that’s good information to have.
Determine your target market (but not everyone)
If you believe everyone is your target market, then the answer is not specific enough. If you believe “small businesses” or “busy mums” are your target market, this still is not specific enough.
Who will pay you? Seriously ask yourself and answer this with specificity. Who is so desperate to solve their problem that they’ll pay someone else to fix it? What do they do for a living? Where do they congregate online? What are they losing sleep over? The more clearly you envision who this person is – the easier everything else becomes.
Why does this matter? It virtually writes your marketing for you down the line. What to say, where to say it and how to make them care becomes obvious if you know you’re speaking to someone specific. If you’re vague in targeting, you’ll be vague in messaging – and subsequently, sales will suffer.
Figure out how you’ll get customers
This is where reality smacks you in the face (in a good way). It doesn’t matter if you’ve created the best product in the world if no one knows about it – or worse – knows how to find it.
New entrepreneurs fail to recognise this need from the get-go. They build and assume that once they build something good enough, it’ll be known by everyone. That’s not how any of this works – there’s too much competition on the web, too many distractions for people not to think the attention will be handed to them on a silver platter.
You need a plan for visibility from day one – even in niche spaces. It might mean content marketing, paid ads, partnerships, affiliate programs or some hybrid of everything. But there must be some sense of connection for buyers to occur – and this is where many new entrepreneurs get paralysed trying to figure it out without breaking the bank in the process.
New entrepreneurs benefit from the best advertising platform which help entrepreneurs with no marketing expertise and without an agency-level budget to make an impact and achieve visibility without wasting time for traction in the early stages. If you can run cheap but effective ads even before you’ve found a buyer, you’ve got some success from the get-go.
Get all the boring stuff done
No one started their business because they want to do all the boring-but-necessary stuff like business licensing and accounting programs – but if you skip it now, you’ll regret it later.
You must have a legal structure in place. For example, a sole proprietorship is the easiest way to go about things, but check with an accountant whether an LLC makes more sense for what you’re doing. Create a separate business bank account (yes – even if you’re starting with so little). You want to separate yourself from your finances now because in five years when your accountant dives into your documentation? It will save time later since there will be no fluff before getting down to business.
Get basic insurance if you’re doing something that could go sideways (accidents happen). Get easy bookkeeping under way so you don’t rush scrambling at tax time. Use Wave or QuickBooks or something simple – but make sure your system is in place before you have clients or projects on your plate.
Create your minimum viable offer
Don’t wait until everything is perfect to sell something – perfect is the enemy of done, and done is what’s going to pay your bills.
Determine what minimum value you can provide at the beginning that’s going to solve a problem. Dismiss any extra frills that may come down the line – what’s the minimum viable offer (MVP) that solves a problem? Start there.
This serves two purposes: you’ll get cash flow and revenue sooner than later and you’ll learn through trial and error versus assuming what your initial clients might appreciate. You can always add bells and whistles later; most companies began as something simple than what they’ve turned into today.
Price it appropriately
New entrepreneurs always underprice themselves out of fear they’ll lose customers because they price too highly – but they end up selling themselves short against competitor offerings without providing basic value – and subsequently burn themselves out.
Price speaks volumes. If you’re going in with cheap offerings just to get clients (spoiler alert: nightmare clients) on board, your pricing isn’t established correctly – or your personal worth hasn’t been fully developed yet.
Determine what you need to charge to operate successfully; include salary based on time expended plus overhead – what’s realistically valuable – and add a margin for profit. If that number seems high based on comparable analysis – good – you’ve found your sweet spot. Price what you know you’re worth plus what’s fair.
Create your first customer acquisition system
You may not need a sales funnel or twelve-step nurture sequence yet – but you do need some basic repeatable means of turning strangers into familiarised customers. Even if it means simply posting valuable content over social with a call-to-action until something clicks.
Creating a system implies repeatability leading to success; this is not meant to be a one-off tactic – it should be done even when motivation is low or creativity isn’t flowing; entrepreneurs rely on self-sustaining structures; creating one now will pay off later.
Launch even if you’re not ready
Guess what? You’re never 100% ready! You’ll always feel there’s one more thing that needs fixing, one more feature that needs adding, one more tweak that requires attention; so just launch.
Put your offerings out there for feedback – even if it’s negative because that’s how you improve. You’ll learn more in one week of real-market feedback than six months of planning. The entrepreneur who waits until perfection is never going to succeed; don’t be afraid to look foolish with feedback as you work through iterations publicly; that’s entrepreneurship.
Keep your expectations manageable
It’s hard starting a business; it’s going to take longer than anticipated; it’s going to cost more than budgeted; it’s going to demand more energy than anticipated.
Most “overnight sensations” took years; most game-changing revelations developed after months of work no one ever saw come together behind the scenes; if you’re looking for quick wins out of the gate – you’re going to be disappointed. But if you’re looking for sustained effort where showing up even when it’s not working yet proves you’re serious – then you’ve got a solid chance.
Approach these fundamentals first and everything else will be easier down the line.
Top photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash
