WHAT FACTORS SET THEM APART?
This article is a self-evaluation of what we have learnt from online training in the last one year from our certification courses from Startup school of YC, Global scaling training from OpenExo and Purpose alliance and Google UX certification .
Thank God that we did not get any investment last year. For us It is a blessing in disguise because we would have never realized our mistakes and improved upon them. We would have wasted funds and time in correcting the mistakes. All have seen startups growing speedily by pumping in huge money in social / digital media media advertising due to initial success and excitement and then completely failing after tremendous initial growth within one or two years
This is a personal view that may be useful for some founders but there is no intention of teaching anything to anyone involved in the start-up ecosystem which have stalwarts and qualified experts in every area of operations. We are just learning before getting any investment and relaunching our Bloodyfast mobile app in near future.
Your guidance and mentoring is always welcome to improve upon ourselves. Correct us if we are wrong. Continuous learning and developing our app three times and improving upon earlier version, this is how we have learnt the lessons by making mistakes and correcting them
There is no point in talking about why the startups fail. This article may take care of it automatically. Let us just mention a few points in brief that are beyond any discussion. Lots of brainstorming is needed when you go from POC to Prototype to MVP Following issues are very basic and assumed as already taken care of by visionary founders who wish to launch it successfully and making ordinary / extraordinary profit
Persistent existing problem/s which demand solution/s
Global scalability with huge target audience
Founder-product fit
Product market fit
High quality limited number of staff
Low monthly burn rate
7) Features that compel users to be our ambassador
and their proactive help in making app go viral. These
users is a backbone of the success of any app and that too
by paying us
The cheap digital/social media training from Udemy is a good starting point https://www.udemy.com/course/digital-marketing-guide/
Try getting first max 1000 customers from family and friends or if you have a bigger social media network to test your product or services. Once you get 1000 users, completely stop spending money on social media advertising When you are sure about organic growth / sticking ratio / DAU / MAU ratio / accelerated downloads by your target audience, you can conduct user surveys to be sure. Repeated use of app by consumers and their proactive initiative to spread our app on their own makes a big difference
Product/service is perfectly priced, UI / UX ( Aesthetics and internal navigation within the features is perfected and successfully tested and founders are happy with limited initial traction. Understanding If you are approaching a inflection point with limited users or not is not a rocket science. Detailed study of back-end and Google analytics or any other analytical tools will certainly indicate the approaching inflection point of growth of your product or service.
Only when you are sure of stickiness of customers and their accelerating positive response, you must start your burst of your social / DIGITAL media ad budgets. Till you are not sure, blowing up huge budget to acquire customers can be suicidal.
If this does not happen then you have following choices
A) Work on UI and UX ( Refine/modify/ delete / add features before going ahead Customer surveys are extremely useful in making major changes in the features
B) Completely pivoting the model of business if possible at that stage
C) Completely abandon the project and do something else if the initial limited number of users do not respond to your offerings exactly as per your expectations
Blowing up huge amount on social media marketing, getting millions of downloads, getting initial traction and revenue etc is all possible and is very illusionary to fool few gullible investors but it does not meaning anything till you achieve inflection point with limited number of users and you are sure pf all KPIs are exactly as per your expectations
When unicorn dream shown by startup founder matches the unicorn dream of investors without solid basis, failure is guaranteed
Exponential growth is directly proportional to the real happiness of customers to use your product and the Bragging factors you add to your products and services so that they become your free promoters and pay you too for using your product.
How to serve and inspire your customers to be your free promoters is the key.
Forget that we are founders and get into the shoes of customers is the important role you must play to understand real issues and subtle nuances that will lead to a change in business, pricing and design strategy that will excite your customers to be your ambassador to promote your product.
No advertising budget, however huge it is, can achieve this. Breathe-live-and chant “CUSTOMER-CUSTOMER -CUSTOMER” We are busy doing the same before we go to investors for funding Correct us if we are wrong
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