All About Startups

Entrepreneurs are not born they are self made, it is something that has to come from within, it is the willingness to do something extraordinary, it is the burning desire to create difference in the world we are living in, it's something that comes from within and takes you to the highest level. Most of us want to be entrepreneurs we want to have our own startup but we do not know where to start, what should be done and what not. Let us look at some of the benefits of startup:

1. Financial Independence: Startup once successful can make lots and lots of money. Let us take an example of Flipkart. It is an Indian E-Commerce company established in 2007 by two IITians with an initial investment of 5,600 dollar  it later raised funds from venture capitalists and it's current revenue is 6.1 billion dollar. So if you start with a billion-dollar idea you will be able to make a lot of money through your startup if executed the right way.

2. Become an Employer instead of being an employ: You will be your own boss in a startup. Startups also increase the employability of a nation, you can hire people to work for you.

3. Giving your creative ideas a way: Suppose you are working in a company and you have a good idea in your mind and you go and discuss it with your boss and he appreciates your idea but will not execute it. In a startup you are free to execute all your creative ideas and give a direction to your own startup.

Now as we have discussed the reasons why people want  to have startups, its time to understand what is the right way to start it, what are the key things that has to be followed while starting a startup. You must have heard that most of the startups fail and their is a lot of risk involved in it and these risks cannot be eliminated but they can be mitigated, so we need to follow some steps to mitigate the risk of startup failure.

1. Idea: Any business that you start with should have a rock solid reason why you are starting it. Keep your eyes and ears open for ideas to come, look around you, find the problems that people are facing choose a problem and start working upon it, think how can that problem be solved. 

2. Empathy Study: Study the market around you, conduct surveys, ask people, take their suggestions. You need to do the survey of the market for the product or service that you are going to produce, look what is the demand of your product, how much market you can capture. Ultimately your product is going to reach out to the customers so it is better to do an empathy study first and know the demands of your customers. 

3. The Unfair Advantage: After studying the market you will get to know who your competitors are, who are the current alternatives and then you will have to decide what is going to be new or different in your service from the others which can influence the customers. One thing to keep in mind here is that your idea should not be something that can be copied easily come up with a firm unfair advantage.

4. Your Team: Investors while investing in a startup look at the revenue model, marketability, scale of the model, what the competitors are doing but all these factors just contribute to the thirty percent of the role, the main seventy percent depends on the entrepreneur and the team. Today we can have a billion-dollar idea but the way we execute it decides everything, so you need to choose your dream wisely.

And once you have done all these you will be ready for your startup, you now can go to the investors or the incubators and present your idea. But remember, to become successful you need to be ready for failures, failures do not mean you have failed, they mean you have not succeeded yet. Your initial attempts might fail but you will succeed by the end of the day.