How to Start a Startup

how to start a startup: a step-by-step guide

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Learning how to start a startup the right way is essential to become successful. In this article, you’ll learn a proven step-by-step process that will increase your likelihood of thriving with your new company. We provide you with details and resources to help you within almost every step. Using them, you’ll be able to advance more confidently after completing each phase.

This post also acts as a startup checklist of things you need to complete so you can start and grow. Make sure you bookmark or favorite this page so you can come back to it as a reference point during this early-stage of your startup.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Before Starting a Startup
  3. Assess your level of expertise
  4. Figure out if you have the time
  5. Develop your startup idea
  6. Build customer profiles and buyer personas
  7. Create a value proposition and unique selling proposition
  8. Do market research
  9. Do competitive analysis
  10. Determine how you’ll build your startup
  11. Distribution and acquisition channels
  12. Financing your startup
  13. Create your financial model
  14. Re-visit your idea to see if it’s plausible
  15. Perform a SWOT
  16. Find a co-founder or two
  17. Name your startup
  18. Get a logo made
  19. Build your website or landing page
  20. Set up your social media accounts
  21. Continue learning about entrepreneurship a little bit each day
  22. Building a minimum viable product
  23. Register your startup in your country
  24. Look for an accountant and lawyer
  25. Learn how to use Google Analytics
  26. Test your hypothesis with your MVP
  27. Hand-pick your first customers
  28. Market your service or product
  29. Get press for your startup
  30. Get a bank account
  31. Start charging for your product or service, get more traction, and make money!
  32. Continue to work to obtain product-market fit
  33. Conclusion

Introduction

Let’s briefly discuss two facts about the startup industry so you can become mentally prepared for your journey.

1) 70 to 75% of venture-backed startups fail according to CB Insights.

2) Up to 90% of startups fail overall.

While these statistics may seem shocking, by learning Why Learning About Startup Failure is Critical to Startup Success, and by taking advantage of our online startup incubator program, you can learn not only how to start a startup, but also learn how you can avoid costly and stressful mistakes, giving you a much greater chance of achieving short and long-term success.

Secondly, before I dive into each step, I want to share the number one reason for startup failure, so you can learn about it.

Then, after this brief section, we dive into the 30-step process of how to start a startup.

The First Step to Take Before You Start Building

One of the most crucial things that startup founders neglect is they skip the first several steps to validate their startup.

Founders often start building a product that nobody wants and/or the founder(s) don’t have the background and expertise to start a startup in a specific niche.

Because of these things, 42% of startups create products that the market doesn’t need — and it’s the number one reason for startup failure.

That’s why it’s important to validate whether your startup idea is really worth pursuing by seeing if you’re making something people actually need, rather than what you think they need.

Keep in mind that your life is more valuable than a startup idea. So don’t get discouraged if an idea doesn’t pan out. You’re better off not wasting years of your life and many thousands of dollars from making a product or service that’s not filling a need.

That’s why we show you how to start a startup in this guide which includes how to validate a startup idea because idea validation is one of the most important steps you can take.

But we take this muuuuch farther and have a full-fledged idea validation course within our Online Startup Incubator Program. Our program will help you have a far higher chance of success if your idea becomes validated.

Step 1: Assess Your Level of Passion and Expertise

Assess your ability to solve the problem that your target market has and your passion for your idea.

Passion is required for startup founders. If you’re passionate about your startup and your mission, then you’re going to be much more likely to succeed. But if you have no passion, then you’re almost definitely going to fail. Your heart has to be in it to win it. Be gladly willing to work on your startup for at least ten years.

Expertise in your target market and is also highly preferable. If your expertise and passion for your startup idea are low, then don’t quit your day job to pursue it. Moreover, expertise in the target is necessary because you’re going to have a tough time developing something you have little to no clue about.

The learning curve is going to be astronomical if you have no experience in your target industry. In this case, it’s going to take you a long time to even start to get up to speed. It’s possibly doable, but you’re going to be a novice. You’ll need a tremendous drive and motivation to consistently immerse yourself in the industry and succeed. Even then, you must assess your passion for the industry you’re learning about.

Step 2: Determine How Much Time You Can Devote

Since it’s a better idea to keep one’s full-time job to be financially sustainable while validating an idea, determine how much extra time you can devote after coming home from work each day. Different roles have different responsibilities, but there’s always going to be work to do.

The more people that work with you, the fewer things you personally need to juggle at once.

If you have great business partners to start out with, then you can start up quicker.

Having co-founders will provide a lot more flexibility, productivity, and speed to everything you do. Four founders is usually the suggested maximum.

However, being your own boss does not mean freedom.

Rather, it’s just a different lifestyle choice.

Customers and the market become your boss and the job requires longer hours than “normal” 9 to 5 jobs.

Here are some things to consider:

  • Think about what your role would be. Would you be the software engineer creating your app or would you be the CEO and take care of the business-side of things? What other role might you have if not those?
  • Are there other people who want to start the startup with you?  What would be their roles and how much time can they devote?  Also find out how financially stable they are and make sure they are stable before starting up with them. Issues with co-founders is the #3 reason why startups fail.
  • Projects timeline estimates should be doubled or tripled. They always take longer than expected.

Again — don’t quit your job if you’re working full-time already. Put most of your spare time towards developing your startup idea and seeing if the idea is worth pursuing before taking further action. This is called idea validation. The reason behind doing idea validation while working is so that founders have money to live.

Founders don’t want to go homeless because they can’t pay rent or mortgage.

Moreover, nor does one want their wife or husband divorcing them because they can’t pay bills.

Once your idea is fully validated and you’re financially secure and have a runway of twelve to eighteen months of money, then you should be able to take the risk and quit your day job.

Step 3: Further Develop Your Startup Idea

If you haven’t already, part of starting a startup properly is brainstorming.

Start by writing down your startup idea and describing the problem you are going to solve for your target industry or niche.

Think of your startup idea as a hypothesis so you can test it and see if it works. That’s because it really is a hypothesis until you have validated it by talking to potential customers to see if it’s something they need.

Brainstorm the different business models you can use. Write them down and keep them organized. You will need them for your idea validation when you’re talking to potential customers. You may also get new ideas on how to improve your idea when you’re talking to your potential customers.

Unfamiliar with idea validation? Start learning How to Validate a Startup Idea.

There’s also scientific method for building startups called the lean startup model, and it was created by Eric Ries. This method is talked about in detail in our post, Product-Market Fit: What It Is, Why You Need It, and How to Get It. Keep this in mind when you’re further developing your startup idea.

However, there are many bad startup ideas that even the lean startup model cannot save.

Your startup can truly be a good startup if you’re creating a solution to an existing problem that people experience in a sizable market.

When you create this solution and you get significant traction, you’re on your way towards getting what’s called product-market fit. That’s like the holy grail of achievements for startups.

But what’s equally important is making money.

Do you know how you will make money with your potential startup?

Whether you don’t know or you do, I would suggest that you review the 10 major B2B and B2C startup business models to see what will work best for both your target customers and your business.

Make sure that you’re solving a problem that a sizable niche experiences, and that people have stated their desire to use your proposed product/service.

This lean startup methodology enables startups to reach product-market fit

Step 4: Build Customer Profiles and Buyer Personas

Find out who your ideal customer is because your company will be based on what your customers want and need. You want to know as much about that ideal customer as possible.

Click on the following link to get the best understanding of how to build customer profiles and buyer personas.

When you build out your customer profile, you’ll need to write down their pain points within their industry or niche so you can better understand what is important to them and what isn’t. Pain is a feeling that creates emotion. If you can help alleviate some of their pain or eliminate it all-together then you are on the right track.

You’re creating this buyer persona where one steps into the shoes of that target user and thinks about their life, how they’d act, what they’d want, their interests or affinities for interests, the type of job they have, and so forth. You’ll also want demographics, device usage statistics, market segment data, what types of websites they are likely to visit, and any other information you can learn.

This is a truly important step for when people are learning how to start a startup. That’s because 42% of startups die because they made something their target customers didn’t want or need. Therefore, really do your best to get to the root of their pain and frustration with your idea for your product/service and make sure they’d use it.

Step 5: Create Your Value Proposition & Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Develop your value proposition and unique selling proposition to show how you provide value to your target customers and what makes your startup unique, or stand out.

A value proposition states what value you are going to be able to provide your target customers.

This value doesn’t inherently mean what is your product doing for them, but rather it answers what problem(s) you are specifically solving for them.

Write down the benefits of your product or service to your target customer and not the features.

What is the pain you’re alleviating from their lives?

Write down how you’re helping your target customer solve a pain point they have.

Get into the root cause(s) of their pain psychologically.

Step 6: Market Research

Perform market research to find out information about your market and its demographics.

Find out the market size by typing in your niche and then “market size statistics.”

It’s incredibly important to do your research because you have to find out if your startup idea is really worth pursuing.

Furthermore, if your startup idea is indeed worth pursuing, then you’re going to need all of the research.

The research will help you when you write your executive summary, your marketing plan, your pitch deck, and for writing blog posts.

Step 7: Competitive Analysis

Perform a competitive analysis to find any competitors and write them in the competitive analysis spreadsheet.

Search by keywords (1 to 2 words) and long-tail keywords (3 to 7 words) in Google, Bing, as well as in social media outlets.

The keywords would be the same keyword combinations someone would use if they were looking for the services or product your startup would offer.

You also want to find out:

  • Where they’re located and how many locations they have.
  • Their social media metrics (such as followers on Twitter, likes on their Facebook page, if there are a lot of people retweeting and liking their tweets, and a bunch of people liking and commenting on their Facebook posts).
  • And if they have any AdWords or Display ads on Google when you’re doing keyword searches.

Moreover, if the market is too crowded with competitors who are established in the market and your startup idea doesn’t have a major differentiator with a unique selling proposition, then you should not move forward with your startup idea. They will easily outcompete you.

Step 8: Determine How You’ll Build Your Startup

Determine if you can personally build your product or service and website or if you need outside help.

If you can’t build it or find anyone else that can, then there are, at times, workarounds to create mockups.

Mockups are the most useful when you’re in the process of validating your idea to potential users and/or for investor presentations.

Mockups can help you get funding to build your app, product, service, or site.

Three great sites for creating mockups, wireframes, and digital prototypes are:

Programming

If you’re a programmer and you are able to build the software and site for a tech startup, then that’s great.

You will have a lot to learn on the business-side to build it up operationally and to market it properly.  Luckily, our startup development kits can help you with that.

If you’re not a programmer or web developer, then you will obviously need some help.

Moreover, finding a good developer to work for equity is rare, but it happens.

Learn how and where to find a technical co-founder via this guide: How to Find a Co-Founder and What to Look For.

However, without a technical co-founder, you usually will have to pay someone or an agency to build your website and/or software/hardware.

In that case, then you could check out the many talented programmers at sites you can find in this post: 13 Best Freelance Websites to Hire Top Talent.

Physical Products & Prototyping

In addition, for startups making physical products, you’ll need to make a prototype.  This article from Entrepreneur called Creating a Prototype from will help you understand physical product development better.

Also, check out this guide to the best 3D printers from 3DHubs.

Step 9: Distribution & Acquisition Channels

Determine where and how your product or service will and can possibly be sold (physical &/or digital).

Think about the physical geography, the digital landscape, if the product needs packaging, or if the product will need to be sold in stores, or online stores, or just your website.

  • Your own store
  • Delivery
  • Chain stores and independent stores
  • Buying via your website
  • Purchasing your product via Amazon

Distribution channels for digital products:

  • Your website
  • Your app
  • Mobile app stores
  • Online retailers
  • Partnering websites

Acquisition Channels:

  • Anywhere your target customers gather
  • Joint-venture partnerships with influencers in the industry and getting them to email the subscribers on their list to market your product or service. Usually, affiliate compensation is provided to that influencer.
  • Social media
  • Facebook groups
  • Paid Ads
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Connect in groups and with others via searches or introductions
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Google +
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • Product Hunt
  • Public Speaking
  • Featured articles about you by press
  • Your website — using great copy and lead magnets

Step 10: Financing Your Startup

Determine how much money you can devote to building your startup and if you need outside investment to build and grow it.

Devote between $2,000 and $15,000 USD of your own money.

Be frugal in the sense that you should only spend money on things that are absolutely necessary.

Try to be self-funded as long as possible.  Seeking money from investors implies that you’ll be giving up equity in your startup and that’s okay. You just have to weigh the opportunity.

Investors should ideally be providing more than just their money. For instance, the best investor will be able to provide their resources and network to help you grow as fast as possible. The best investor will invest in startups within the same industry focuses, so try to find investors that match that description.

If you have no expertise in product development or software/web/database development, then you will need to pay a manufacturer or developers to build it. But you need to fund its development, too.

So where can you get outside money to fund your product development at the beginning?

  • Friends and family fundraising
  • Crowdfunding campaigns including equity crowdfunding
  • Sponsorships
  • Seed-stage venture capital firms
  • Angel investors

Step 11: Create Your Business Model

Build out business models using Excel to see exactly how you’re going to make money with your startup.

Include any overhead and fixed costs you have in that model, including a marketing budget, and roughly project future salaries.

Create several pricing strategies so you can see how the different financial models work.

Remember that this business model is exploratory so you can find out if your startup idea is worth pursuing.

It’s an essential element in how to start a startup, but you don’t need to have an insanely detailed spreadsheet.

Gross profit is how much money in sales you get.

Net profit is how much money you have left over from sales after subtracting all of your costs.

Your startup idea needs to sustainably make money and create net profit.

You want to have at least a 40% net profit margin so you can continue to expand. 50% margin or more is the rule of thumb.

Ad revenue is unsustainable for a startup 99% of the time unless you have hundreds of millions of users.

Don’t even worry about how much market share you should aim for.

What matters is how you can improve your growth rate week over week and month over month.

However, you won’t convert every website visitor into a customer, so you have to take that into account.

You should aim to convert between 5 to 10% of your new visitors into leads, and around the same percentage range for your overall leads because there’s attrition.

Depending on your pricing strategy, if you can consistently reach those conversion rates or do better, then you’ll probably have a sustainable business.

Moreover, when projecting revenue for the first two years, factor in how many customers you expect to get per month, based on percentage ranges of your traffic. To learn more about what assumptions to have for a startup financial model, check out this article.

I recommend you check out the article on Medium called SaaS Financial Model: Simple Template For Early-Stage Startups.

To gain a more detailed understanding of financial modeling for startups, check out this article by SlideBean and download the spreadsheet provided by them. Warning: their spreadsheet is complex.

Step 12: Re-Evaluate Your Startup Idea

Re-evaluate your idea to determine if your idea is plausible after the competitive analysis by seeing how saturated the market is based on market share and market size.

If your idea holds up, then find your target customers through social media or other places you know they gather and ask for their opinions on your startup idea.

Ask if your target customers would buy the service at the costs you mention.  Ask them if it would be indispensable to them if they had it.

An internet SaaS startup that targets small market sizes less than 10 million people are much less likely to be worth pursuing, especially if you’re looking for angel or venture capital financing. Moreover, it’s important to be able to make money with your startup, though, without investors.

Step 13: Perform a SWOT

Conduct a SWOT analysis of yourself and the business idea to better understand yourself.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

To do this on yourself it requires you to be open to analyzing yourself, but it’s very useful. Can you constructively criticize yourself? This is especially useful when you’re starting your search for co-founders, which you will learn more about in the next section.

However, a SWOT is only applicable for your startup when you have market data on your competition because they represent the threats.

SWOT analysis infographic showing strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats
From Wikipedia

Step 14: Find a Co-Founder or Two

Look for co-founders with complementary skill sets and with minimal skill overlap.

If you’re a business developer, look for a technical co-founder, and vice versa. This concept is the same if you’re a marketer because you’ll then need a technical co-founder.

Check out this post How to Find a Co-Founder and What to Look For which goes into more depth than anything else.

You can look for co-founders on several sites which are listed in the above link. And there may be people you may already be friends with that have the expertise you need to be a co-founder of yours.

However, don’t just jump into a business partnership. Rather, take some time to make sure you are both on the same page with expectations, company culture, equity allocation, company direction, etc.

It’s important to make sure they have a good personality and are someone whom you could get along with well and spend a lot of time with.  Be prepared to work with them for ten years.

In addition, the values you have and set up for your startup will help you find a co-founder that’s the right fit for you.

In our article How Startup Culture Can Make or Break Your Success, we also discuss finding co-founders who have the same value system because it affects your startup’s ability to stand the test of time and thrive in the long-term.

Step 15: Name Your Startup

Pick a name that has something about your product/service’s core offering within the name.

The process of naming a startup can take a several hours or can span over a period of days, but it’s quite worth it when you find a startup name that fits perfectly with your startup description.

The most basic way to explain how to name a startup is through brainstorming words that match your industry, startup description, customer profile, and all synonyms for them. Then, try to mix and match. In addition, you should obviously make sure that your startup name will be available as a domain name.

However, I suggest you check out this short post to help you figure out how to name a startup: Naming a Startup: How to Name One and Why It Matters. The post will give you a more complete description of how to go about naming your startup.

Step 16: Get a Logo Made

You can make your own logo via Canva’s Online Logo Maker or via Logo Maker (this is not the same logo maker).

Canva’s Online Logo Maker can help you build your brand identity the quick and easy way, thanks to its intuitive, easy-to-use drag-and-drop design platform that’s online and free to use.

If you don’t want to make your own logo, then we suggest you check out this post with the 13 Best Freelance Websites to Hire Top Talent.

There, you’ll discover several websites that feature countless designers who can create a quality logo for you.

Tip: Get two versions of your logo – a square logo and a 16:9 logo for different purposes.

Step 17: Build Your Website

Build a basic website that describes your future product offerings and make a landing page with an email signup.

WordPress is an amazing free website-building tool that has its own comprehensive content management system. However, you’ll need to use a web server hosting company to host your website and there is a learning curve for WordPress & for hosting servers.

You can pick from thousands of free website themes to style your website and hundreds of thousands of plugins to enhance the usability of your website.

Learn about the formatting you need to have for your website through: How to Structure a Startup Website.

Other options are to check out these tools that can help you build your landing page, by Neil Patel.

Step 18: Social Media Account Setup

Set up social media accounts so you can reserve your account names before other people get the same idea and snatch up the usernames.

If you don’t have a graphic designer on hand, then find a freelancer that can make social media banners for you.

Alternatively, you can use one of the other previously suggested sites to find someone else to make these banners.

Step 19: Never Stop Learning About Entrepreneurship and Startups

Start reading books on entrepreneurship for one hour a day or watch videos, listen to audio interviews/lessons, listen to podcasts…just always keep learning.

Learning keeps you grounded and constantly on the path to improving yourself and your startup. Without learning, you become stagnant.

And, as a founder, you need to constantly do other tasks that you’ve never done before.

In addition, a pro-productivity tip is that you can kill two birds with one stone by listening to pertinent podcasts or audio interviews or watching videos on startups while exercising or doing things that don’t require brain-power.

Step 20: Build a Minimum Viable Product

Your minimum viable product is meant to be something that will assist you in validating your product/idea with customers early on.

You’ll need a minimum viable product (MVP) to start out.  This basically means it’s a barebones version of what your full idea is supposed to be.

However, in short, you:

  1. Write out the framework of your product or service.
  2. Write what the main aspects of it are.
  3. Detail how you want it to work.
  4. Then, find out how you can make that happen in a stripped-down way to test your hypotheses further.

Remember, your hypothesis is going to be about solving a pain point for your target customer.

Step 21: Register Your Startup in Your Country

You should register as a corporation, LLC, or LLP (USA Only) once you start seeing lots of users signing up and talking about your product/service.

Legalzoom.com

Legalzoom offers basic services for registering your startup, but they’re not as comprehensive as you might want it to be.

Clerky: The easiest way for startups to get legal paperwork done safely

Clerky has more than just company formation documents. They also have fundraising, hiring, and commercial categories that they provide their services to, as well.

Stripe Atlas: The Best Way to Start an Internet Business

This package gives you just about everything you need legally to start your startup, starting at $500. That tagline is Stripe’s, however, they’re an inexpensive alternative to forming your corporation and provide lots of help and resources. We definitely recommend you consider them.

Cooley GO

Cooley GO is a great free resource for startups to learn about the legalities of starting a corporation, LLC, or LLP. It was created by the law firm, Cooley LLP, and they have extraordinary lawyers for startups. Cooley has 900 lawyers across 12 offices in the United States, China, and Europe.

However, Cooley GO has one-upped LegalZoom and other incorporation services and made this free Incorporation Package Generator.

As per Cooley’s website:

The Cooley GO Docs Incorporation Package Generator allows you to generate any or all of the following documents:

  • Action by the Sole Incorporator
  • Certificate of Incorporation
  • Bylaws, which automatically includes: Certificate of Secretary confirming adoption of Bylaws and Indemnification Agreements for each named Director
  • Employee Confidential Information and Inventions Assignment Agreement
  • Initial Action by Directors (Unanimous Written Consent)
  • Restricted Stock Purchase Agreement, which automatically includes:
    • Technology Assignment Agreement
    • Stockholder Consent to Receive Electronic Communications
    •  If the stock is subject to vesting, the following will also be included:

Gust Launch

Gust Launch helps serious startups with company formation, legal matters involved with company formation, and even help with some of the financials. Their service starts at $99/mo. Moreover, Gust’s service is pretty good and a decent option if you have the money to spend on their service.

Step 22: Get an Accountant (CPA is better) and Lawyer(s)

Find an accountant and find one or more lawyers for the type of startup you have.

Accounting

Look for an accountant who can help you keep your books in accordance to the law. You’ll need to track: operating cash flow, profits and losses (P&E), assets, taxation, return on equity or capital gains, net margin, gross profit margin, accounts payable, accounts receivable, EBITDA, etc.

You’ll also need to keep track of your burn rate, run rate, and cap table, to name a few.

CPAs are better than regular accountants because there are people with QuickBooks experience or something similar who can do many accounting functions, but not all. Ideally, you use someone who became a certified public accountant rather than someone without a license. They will understand the tax laws you need to abide by.

Legal

Find a lawyer that specializes in the needs a startup has, such as for business formation and corporate law. If you operate in one state of the United States, but are a registered Delaware corporation, then you’ll need someone with that type of experience.

As you scale, you’ll need attorneys that can also protect your company by keeping you in compliance with human resources practices.

In addition, you may need other lawyers for anything else that’s really important, such as for patents, intellectual property, and copyrights.

Patents and Intellectual Property

Look for any existing patents that may prohibit your product from being built.

You might want to schedule a free consultation appointment with an intellectual property, patent, and copyright lawyer (most first-time appointments are free of charge).

See if your product/service violates any intellectual property and patents or if you need specific licensing rights from other companies in order to sell it.

Do the research because you’re better safe than sorry.

Step 23: Learn How to Use Google Analytics

Sign up for Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for your website.

Google Analytics is going to be an integral part of your strategy to obtain product-market fit and growth hack your company to success.

Why? Because the only way to scientifically growth hack is to use analytics to measure and analyze the results of your campaigns. You want to make sure you’re measuring as much as you possibly can.

You will want to measure:

  • Bounce rate
  • Pageviews per session
  • Returning visitors
  • Time on page
  • Content drilldown
  • How many button clicks you get for your videos
  • Landing pages they arrived on
  • Demographics
  • How users found you
  • How many email conversions you get and the conversion rate

Check out 34 Key Performance Indicators to Measure Your Startup to learn more about measurement and analysis for your startup.

Here’s another golden nugget for you:

You can learn all about how to use Google Analytics through free courses by Google!

It’s called the Google Analytics Academy.

If you’re using WordPress, you can download a plugin for called “Insert Headers and Footers.” Then once installed, you will place the code in the header section so your website can track your website’s performance.

However, if you’re not using WordPress, then you can search on YouTube or Google “How to set up Google Analytics on your website/android app/iOS app” or about any other questions you may have regarding it.

Step 24: Test Your Hypothesis Using Your MVP

As you start marketing, this is going to be considered the first real test of your hypothesis of whether or not your MVP is going to get traction for you.

The traction is going to be considered how many signups that you’re going to get as well as the number of users that are signing up per day/week/month.

To get signups, you need to have an email list to subscribe them to. Try MailChimp (affiliate link). It’s free for up to 2000 subscribers and the price scales up based on the number of subscribers you have unless you want advanced features such as automation.

However, to get signups, you also need to have opt-ins and other ways to get leads.

Check out this post to help you: 10 Lead Generation Strategies to Grow Your Startup Fast.

You’ll get strategies, tools, and tips on how to make it happen.

Your goal is to get product-market fit where 40% of your paid users basically say that they “can’t live without” your service/product or it becomes indispensable.

When you have reached this goal, you’ve successfully growth hacked your product to product-market fit.

Usually, the process of getting to attaining this 40% goal is also called growth hacking, by experimenting with your marketing activities to make it work.

Step 25: Hand-Pick Your First Customers

Hand-pick your first customers. You can find them on social media or through their websites and contact them via email.

A great article to illustrate what’s meant by hand-picking your customers is by a famous entrepreneur, Paul Graham, called “Do Things That Don’t Scale,” check it out. This article provides you with the mindset that will make or break your startup go from zero to one, as Peter Thiel would say.

Tell your target customers what you’re doing with your startup and why. Show value to your target customers and get feedback on your product/service from them, as well.

You can often get them to pre-order your product if it’s a good match for them.

You can also join startup directories, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, and find people through meetups.

Step 26: Market Your Product or Service

Start your marketing and focus on marketing on one channel very well, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram.

When marketing, tout the benefits your target users will receive more than the features you have with your product or service. Show them how you’re going to improve an aspect of their life.

Facebook converts the best and has the most users on it.  Your goal should be to bring as many people back to your landing page to sign up to your email list/newsletter as possible.

Provide as much value as possible to your target market and they will be much more likely to sign up to your email list, especially in exchange for an attractive offer.

Here are some helpful growth-based social media marketing resources for you:

You can also market by using Google Adwords, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads. Below are two helpful articles you can read about it.

Step 27: Get Press For Your Startup

Contact members of the press to feature your company to their audience.

Make sure you’re writing information that’s going to be relevant and interesting to the audience of the publication.

Don’t do email blasts with your press release!

This is NOT how to get press.

You’ll be ignored by those who you want to be noticed by.

Instead, you should email each reporter and columnist individually.

Communicate like a human being and show value to the reporter that you’re contacting. Show them that you have relevant information that their audience would like. If they ask for more information, then give it to them, but keep it concise.

Step 28: Get a Bank Account

Go to the bank that has the best combination of convenience and account perks.

To do this in the United States, you will first need to file for an EIN, or employer identification number.

You can do so quite easily online and get it within minutes.

You can find the link to the page here.

Whatever bank you pick, remember that you’ll usually have a minimum account balance and monthly maintenance fee.

Don’t worry about checks for your business bank account because you can buy those anywhere for cheap.

Step 29: Start Charging for Your Product/Service and Gain More Traction

Charge money for your minimum viable product and/or do pre-orders for your product/service.

Email is the best converting medium for sales. That’s because your subscribers have warmed up already, assuming you have had consistent email marketing and have built up trust with them.

This means you’ll want to convert your website visitors into leads. Your minimum baseline should be a 2% conversion rate, but you should work towards having at least 5% to 10% of your visitors converting into leads. More than 10% is above average. 15% is great. Any higher is stellar!

The best way to achieve better conversion rates with subscribers and making sales is through better copywriting and A/B testing.

An email drip campaign will help you enhance your chances of making a sale, even if it’s a pre-order.

However, be aware that there are three phases of the buyer’s journey:

  1. Awareness stage
  2. Consideration stage
  3. Decision stage

You’ll need to know which phase to target for your marketing campaigns.

Otherwise, you will not be happy with your results.

Moreover, you want people to be as comfortable and informed as possible so that they’re fine with making the decision to buy from you.

Even though email is the highest converting medium to get sales, you’ll still need to do a combination of different activities such as:

  • Paid ads on Facebook or Google or wherever your niche is
  • Social media
  • Community building
  • Webinars
  • Joint-venture launches (as affiliates)
  • Influencer marketing
  • Selling it on marketplaces
  • And more

Step 30: Work to Obtain Product-Market Fit

If you’re not hitting your target marks, keep tweaking your content, features, customer experience, and UX/UI.

Measure those tweaks via analytical testing methodologies such as A/B testing, forms, surveys, NPS (net promoter score), conversion rates, click rates, and multivariate testing (if your audience is in the tens of thousands).  Experiment to find out what is working and what is under-performing. Experimentation is the act of growth hacking.

If you change everything at once your data will be skewed.  The best approach is by tweaking and measuring one thing at a time. Learn more about how to growth hack, check out this post on How to Growth Hack Your Startup.

Feel free to reference Product-Market Fit: What It Is, Why You Need It, and How to Get It.

Conclusion

The single most important thing you can do for yourself and your (potential) startup’s future is to make sure you have a good idea that fills a need or gap in the market.

Work hard, stay positive, and be focused on your long term and short term goals.

Plan out your activities one by one, stay the course, and you can be victorious with your startup.

Speaking of courses, we have an unbelievable idea validation course within our Incubator Program.

Participating in it will help you validate or invalidate your idea and build an incredible foundation for your startup. It helps you avoid the top causes of startup failure (since 90% of startups fail), reduce stress, get better organized, and even find your first customers who will help you validate your idea!

Start your journey with our 14-day free trial and begin building your dream business today.

What are the biggest challenges you are having with starting your startup? We’d love to help, so let us know!

 

 

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  • 3 Responses

    1. WOW, such a great article. Really loved the way you explained everything with such ease.
      Great job buddy.

    2. Thank you! I like this content very much. But I can add that many factors depend on development team – so you should hire the best developers. You can hire freelance developers or use services of the offshore software development company

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