To avoid being a failure in business, here are seven ways to guarantee success and profitability when starting a business.
Generally, entrepreneurs come up with an idea for a business, put together a business plan, raise the necessary capital (either investors or personal savings), then bring it to market and hope to succeed.
The unfortunate truth though is, most will not.
To avoid being a failure in business, here are seven ways to guarantee success and profitability when starting a business:
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Identify a customer you want to serve: Identify people you want to make up and serve. This will help you feel fulfilled and rewarded as you start the time consuming process of launching your business.
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Talk to your customers: After identifying your ideal customer, you can either guess what products or services they like, or you can talk to them and find out from them what they would like. Too many businesses guess, so set yourself apart by asking questions with the goal of identifying a problem that is deep and painful.
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Let your customers create your business: Customers are marketing geniuses because they can tell you the exact solution to solve their pain. Take that and use it to your advantage.
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Presell your product: Like I said, your customers are marketing geniuses so let them know a product you want to bring to market and ask them how much they would want to pay for it and ask them to pay for it upfront. You can incentivize your customers to jump on board as a beta-user or just by giving additional value to them. Another way is to give them intimate access to you as a founder.
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When you have sufficient funds, go: Once you have covered your startup costs with preselling, you can then take action and build your business. This way you reduce your risk by eliminating the need to fund the launch yourself and also lets you start with a strong customer base.
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Create a MVP and let your customers improve it: Once you get a minimum viable product (MVP), get it to your members to get feedback so you can enhance the product. In the end, you will get a better product and they will feel emotionally tied to you and the solution.
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Scale: You start by investing in marketing and considering affiliate relationships and joint ventures. The reason why this will make a lot of sense is because you already have a product that was created for your ideal customers.
Getting into business is a very big risk – so many things could go wrong and nothing is guaranteed. But when you do it right, then you can turn any situation into positives for you.
This article originally appeared on Pulse.ng and was republished with permission.
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