If you’re anything like me, you don’t want to spend 8 hours each day working for companies other people built.
I spent my college years watching webinars about creating start-up businesses and researching how to begin. During these years, I never took action. Does this sound familiar? I knew I wanted to start, but it didn’t seem like something that could turn into reality. I felt destined to work a 9 to 5 because I just had no idea where to begin.
Finally, after graduating college with a marketing degree and meeting my significant other and business partner Scott Mills while working abroad in Shanghai, he helped me take steps towards the goal of starting a company, which had become a mutual goal.
After only about 9 months of working with clients, we were wonderfully busy – maybe a little too busy, only because I didn’t know what work-life balance was at that time – and both felt exhilarated and exhausted. It was great. It’s hard to describe how rewarding it is to finally work for ourselves.
But what are the steps to starting a new business? If you’re in the same place I was – watching webinars, researching, and reading about starting a business but never actually taking action, here are 5 tips to help you get started.
Find Your Mentors
If you’re not sure how to start your new business, you may want to begin by finding mentors: people who have already started a company and you can have a learning relationship with. The more you surround yourself and talk with those who are a few steps ahead or even far ahead, the more concrete and possible your vision will seem.
It’s important to find more than one mentor. If you’re only getting advice from just one person, you’re missing out on learning from different points of view. No one person is going to have all the answers. Here are a few helpful places where you can look for mentors.
It might also feel like too much pressure to form mentor-student relationships with people. That’s okay. You can learn remotely without forming any personal relationships (though creating some personal mentor-student relationships can help you network and have other unforeseen positive results). Immerse yourself with books, podcasts, and interviews of people you admire. All of these contain people’s best thoughts, experiences, and lessons, and they’re there for you to watch and revisit as many times as you like.
Having a support community and mentors willing to guide you gives you a huge advantage; learn all that you can from them and you’ll be much further on your way to starting your business.
Network
You can also learn from others “on the same playing level” as you. Often, they’re also working through the kinds of challenges and issues that you’re dealing with right now. LinkedIn is an excellent resource for this; use it as a proactive research tool join groups connect with people.
Now that the world is getting back to face-to-face events, seminars, conferences, and panels are all other great ways to meet people.
Thom Singer recommends inviting 7 or 8 people to a dinner to network. Look at the schedule and figure out which evening has nothing going on and reserve a table at a nearby restaurant. As you network during the day at the conference, you can invite some of the people you meet to join. You can pay for the dinner, or you can be up front and tell them they will need to pay for their own meal. If you invite one or two of your industry’s key people you would like to get to know better, people will be more likely to join and everyone who attends is going to remember it and appreciate you for it.
After you start networking and have initial conversations, that shouldn’t be the end. The key to networking is to keep in contact periodically so you can continue the relationship. Keep going back to events and over time you can build your personal brand. You can use LinkedIn to stay in touch too.
Find Your Differentiation
Spend some time figuring out what makes your business idea special. Find a compelling reason for customers to choose your brand over competitors, giving you an advantage. With so many startup businesses found in every corner of the world today, you must find a way to stand out.
When we buy goods or services, everyone wants value for money. Yet everyone is different and thinks of value in a different way. Some people will be more attracted by the lowest price whereas others will be attracted by the highest quality. But going beyond this, there are so many more buying considerations than just price/quality.
Some other differentiation strategies you can use might be the experience, convenience, durability, reliability, expertise, warranty, etc.
Learn more about differentiation strategies on Hubspot’s blog here.
Write down your ideas on differentiation because the more you can define it, the easier it will be to explain it on your website or to prospects later on.
Define Your Target Audience
Defining your target audience helps you more effectively shape how they see and they feel about your brand. Who really are they, beyond the obvious? A wellness company might say, well, my target audience are people who want to improve their health. That’s a good place to start but you need to dig deeper.
Start with a basic definition and continue to go deeper. The more specific you get, the better you’ll be able to target people who are similar.
- How old are they?
- Their gender
- Any kids?
- Are they married?
- What is their income?
- Are they working full-time, part-time, stay-at-home, etc?
- What music do they listen to?
- What hobbies do they have?
- What magazines do they read?
Paint in a picture of the personality and their characteristics so you can get a better idea at what motivates their decisions, especially when it comes to your product. What do they want to achieve with their lives? What obstacles are standing in the way of those goals? What emotions will they feel if they can overcome these obstacles?
Once you know who your audience is and how they’re feeling, you’ll know what message your business needs to portray so you can connect with them on a highly personal level.
Start, Then Evolve
Every business evolves over time, and not every business starts out perfect. If for some reason it does start out absolutely perfect, you probably spent too much time preparing. If you’re sitting there thinking, ‘I can’t start my business until everything is perfect—the perfect logo, perfect name, perfect website, perfect social media strategy,’ this mindset is holding you back.
What is actually important is your positioning, messaging, and targeting the right people. If you know who you want to reach and what sets you apart, all that other stuff an evolve with you.
Graham Cochrane mentions the phrase “ugly early” in his podcast on Youtube. The idea is you’re going be ugly when you start anyways, because things take time, so you might as well be ugly when nobody knows you yet. And when you’re starting to be more well known, you can commission a beautiful custom website or have someone help create your perfect logo.
Change in business is guaranteed. Even if you feel like you have the perfect brand to start with, it will still evolve over time as you grow. It’s all a huge learning process to start your first business. You’ll never truly know all the obstacles to prepare for until you begin.
A past version of this article was shared by Millennial Moderator.
