5 crucial mistakes to avoid when launching your first startup

Very often, the desire to create a promising startup and the commitment to your idea overshadow common sense. Especially when you are going to start a business from scratch and have no experience of ups and downs yet. However, lack of experience is not the biggest obstacle if you know how to avoid mistakes or at least minimize their negative impact.

Below we have collected the five most dangerous ones. What is more, we kindly don’t’ recommend to personally test their consequences, and that is why suggest the correct ways of launching your startup as well.

Skipping Your Idea Validation

42% of newly created startups fail because they are not in demand by the market. Checking the relevance of your project after its creation is the worst of all possible strategies since time, money and effort have already been wasted.

That is why the first thing what should you not do in a startup is to think that your idea is promising enough to realize it without validation. 42% of young entrepreneurs think so and unfortunately fail. Before investing your money in the development, or attracting investments from outside, you need to make sure that your idea is really promising enough to bring you profit. To do this, you can use several tactics of economic and marketing research.

• PEST allows you to assess in what external environment your startup will be created and developed
• SWOT allows you to really validate your idea by analyzing its components, plus assess potential threats
• Five Forces is a great tactic for evaluating competitors and target audience buying power.
• Focus groups are great for testing direct feedback from users who might be your potential target audience.

Thinking There Is Something Better Than LEAN Methodology

This is the most crucial mistake you can make when launching your first (or any subsequent) startup. In fact, there is really nothing better than LEAN methodology for startup development since it allows you to:

• develop only those features that will be used by your audience
• save time, money and other resources
• stay flexible and be always ready to respond to the market changes. 

What is more, the essence of LEAN directly echoes the need to validate ideas, and not only the key idea of the project but also every subsequent idea that you want to implement. The LEAN methodology says directly – you shouldn’t do what you are not sure about. And this applies to all stages of project development – from the first market research to marketing after the product launch.

Doing All the Tasks Yourself

Gather a team or do everything yourself? That’s the question. This is a rather controversial point, but practice shows that a startup with a strong team has a better chance of survival, more opportunities for brainstorming innovative ideas, and greater investment attractiveness. People invest in people, and only then in products and technologies. This is one of the reasons why you need a strong team.

Moreover, as your startup grows, the number of daily tasks will also increase. You cannot be a CEO, developer, quality specialist, marketer, content writer, SMM and SEO specialists, accountant, and cleaner in your office at the same time. You need different people for all these roles.

Of course, you don’t need to hire all of these people right after the idea for the project came to your mind. But be prepared for the fact that as the startup grows, you will face this need, and it is always better to outsource different tasks to different specialists than to be personally responsible for everything.

Ignoring an Elevator Pitch and White Paper Creation

No, no, and once more no. You definitely need these two papers for launching a startup. Let us explain why.

• Your elevator pitch is a concise but meaningful explanation of the essence of your idea and its perspective. You should always be ready to tell what problem your project solves and how it does it. Plus, you must reinforce your explanation with facts, trends, and real-world research. What is more, you only have one minute to do this – for example, if you actually met your potential investor in an elevator.
• Your white paper is a complete description of your project, its key idea, and prospects. This document usually contains a description of the development stages, business and marketing strategy, risk assessment and profitability predictions, as well as information about the initiator and the team.

Together, these two documents show the complete picture of your project and form the first impression in the eyes of your potential investors and clients. Therefore, it is wise to ask professional writers to help you create these papers. You may compare their ratings and find the professionals with suitable experience on the best essay writing services website. 

Launching a Project Without a Marketing Strategy in Mind

Many aspiring startups think like this. “Let’s create a product, see what we get in the final result, and then we’ll decide which marketing approaches are best to use to promote it.” Unfortunately, this is almost a direct path to failure.

Marketing is really the final stage of project development, but this stage determines whether your target audience will know about your product, whether they want to use it, and pay for your application, product, or service. This is why a marketing strategy should be thought out right after the validation phase of your idea.

Plus, marketing always means additional costs. If you ignore the creation of a marketing strategy at the beginning of the journey, you may face the fact that you simply will not have the funds for promotion and advertising.

The right way is to think through, plan and provide funding for every stage of development and launch of your startup, plus leave room for unforeseen situations and expenses.

Conclusion

So, these were the most dangerous business mistakes you can make in the process of your startup development and launching. However, now you have all the chances of avoiding them. Just remember the most important rule – you should think, validate, evaluate, and analyze several times before making a new step.