6 Things That Guarantee Startup Success

The idea of startups is catching up like a forest fire. Employees working with business giants are often seen carrying a startup idea in their mind. You can find at least one group of students envisioning themselves as future entrepreneurs in any graduation class. Currently, the world is obsessed with the idea of a startup.

First-time entrepreneurs with their innovative ideas, hard work, well-thought plan of action, supported by their enthusiasm and sometimes industry experience gets the startup thrive. Yet only counted startups earn songs of glory while most fall flat without making a significant impact. Reports by Static Brain say that almost 71% of the startups fail within first 10 years. Overall, 90% of the startups supposedly fail.

Where do planning and strategy go wrong? And what could have made it right? What is that differentiates the startup that succeeds from the others that fail?
Here are the few practices that successful startups do that differentiate then from others:

Compelling Purpose and Focused Mission

Purpose and mission for business are separate entities. The purpose generally reflects the belongingness of business to the society, while the mission is the path to be followed to reach the purpose. Purpose motivates the employees and creates the goodwill among the customers. Mission draws a focused outlay of the directions in which operations are to be executed.

Both of them have a significant role to play in making the business a great success. Keeping these components in your business plan will strategize various business aspects ranging from product development to marketing methods. Most businesses ignore these constituents and loose direction. This eventually leads to diversion from the set goals, which can easily spell a failure for the startup.

Strategized Customer Niche

The business world follows a simple concept as some customers are more valuable than others. It is explained by Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. While starting a business, entrepreneurs are tempted to serve a larger customer base in order to gain greater exposure. The attempt to serve larger customer base makes the product unfocused and scattered. Simply a jack of all trades, master of none story.

A focused approach for the particular customer base is more likely to gain optimum results. Emphasizing more on certain qualities will make your product the best choice for targeted customers and earn customer loyalty. Once you have earned that in the market, you will have all the opportunities to explore greater customer base.

Streamline Internal Business Processes

Business thrives on the effectiveness of several smaller processes. Size and form of the business require different processes to be executed with diverse methods. Because of such variations, startups can suffer disorientation that leads to a fall in productivity. Champion entrepreneurs overcome such mess by deploying a needful dependency layout, such as – hierarchal, sequential, peer-to-peer, etc. and keep it varying as the situation demands.

Appropriate synchronization between all the processes of the business is the only way to meet the set targets in the right timeframe. Seamless communication between all the departments and employees can enable the required synchronization. Flexible connectivity solutions, like Hosted PBX, can come in handy for the entrepreneurs for managing business processes. Such practices draw the line between the success and the failure of any startup. In the times when startups are pouring like cats and dogs, it is of optimum priority to walk the line carefully.

Efficient Customer Support for Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

The first-time entrepreneur considers customer support as an expense to build reputations and has no return is a myth. Customer support driven businesses earn customer loyalty. Delivering customer support is not a huge expense. With the improved VoIP technology, setting up contact center has become effortless and affordable. The technology has evolved so well that even a single person can represent and maintain the virtual contact center while inciting a feel of the well-groomed enterprise.

Also, customer satisfaction adds to financial gain. Basic customer support practices help with customer retention, escaping chargebacks and refunds, etc. to add financial benefits for the startup. Moreover, some businesses can even offer a paid support. A research by Oracle tells that almost 81% of the customers can pay extra for a better experience. Apart from financial gain, offering support grows the trust factor, which startups usually lack. Feedback and issues are received during customer support. The support team interacts with the real and unhappy customers. Getting to know what is troubling the customer leads to finding the ways of serving them satisfactorily in the longer course.

Strong Networking and Support Channel

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” – African proverb.

Things do not fall in accordance with your business plan all the time. It can go wrong and without anyone to support, it will mean demise for the startup. To sustain in the longer with business, smart entrepreneurs try to grow their network and support channels. Right connections create splendid options for business growth. Not only a network can find you some smart pieces of advice to address the toughest business issues, but they can also earn you some reliable partners, marketers, investors, and even the customers.

Marketing is no more about running a 30-seconds commercial during the NFL broadcast. In the era of word-of-mouth marketing, patience is essential when sales are not arriving. Since patience is not sitting idle while waiting for the tables to turn, it is essential to keep working on the indirect factors for the business growth. Being a part of support channel or startup group helps with those internal factors.

Never Lack on Hard Work and Dedication

Rovio Entertainment is renowned for its game, Angry Birds that remained on the top of download charts for several months. But not many people know that Angry Birds was their 52nd game and most of its previous 51 games achieved not a great success. Moral of the story is that often success does not arrive instantly. Being at startup can be a daunting task for employees and entrepreneurs.

Fresh and unforeseen challenges packed with the unpredictable turn of events may require the employees to work overtime. Startups have their own struggles. Unless you are very lucky, the only way to face these struggles is hard work and dedication.