[Early Stage]: One Thing All Start Up Companies Need to Know

It takes courage to get your idea or concept off the ground and its even harder sometimes to take that leap and decided that this is the right move for you.  Its not always about quitting your job in a dramatic fashion because not all of us have the financial backing to do that but there are ways to do things that will get you the results you need.

So where does that leave you? You working in your day job, and then when its clock out time, you head home to start job number two until night-you starts torturing morning-you for no pay and heavy bags in the morning.

What does all this mean for you? Simple. A much slower process in the building of your start up company.

Here is why I suggest patience being the biggest  and most vital asset to any early stage startup. Why? well its simple. Without a good product, that has been nurtured, and taken care of and with the focus and attention on all the right things, you won’t get customers to engage, use, download or whatever you need them to do in order for you to say you are a success or not.  No amount of marketing or clever placements can get people to love your product, or even download it nonetheless if you don’t put your efforts into it too.

Be Patient

Being patient is considered a virtue, and is so important when building a business, or product that it needs to be a first priority in the day.  not having financial and revenue goals early on is important because it means you are caring about to the user and giving them an experience they want to be a part of and want to share with friends.

I’ve been a part of many start-ups from early stage (1-10 people) and built one myself so I can say i’ve seen a lot of scenarios.  For example, I’ve seen a pair of founders rush in for all the wrong reasons and sadly it eventually failed. People are not tuned to stick it out and wait for the money to come in like a long term stock purchase that will grow over time instead they see it as a quick money making machine and this isn’t the right way to do things.  Going in for the quick buck doesn’t help bring value to the product and most importantly it doesn’t help the consumers.

I’ve also seen many who didn’t consider profit and revenue as their goal, and those who did it right succeeded and eventually found clever and original ways to bring in revenues.

A classic example is of Waze (Please note i was not involved with them but its just a great example).  They built drivers GPS and that’s all they did for a long time.  They focused on building a product that actually worked and served as a great tool for drivers across the world.  Only much later did they announce (and I mean several years later) how and what they would generate revenues from their product.  They focused on the unique selling point of the product – the unique crowd-sourcing formula.

All you have to know though, in order to be happy and know that you can do it right is to take your time, do it right, get lots of advice and think long term!  The money will come when the time is right and if you really need the cash to live, then take a ‘day job’ until you are at the place to get some early-stage investments or even enter an incubator and share some of your equity.

Gossip Media Tip: Investors these days don’t want to see how you will generate revenues in the first few years but instead how you plan to generate revenue in your long term plan. It’s not really important how you plan to do it but the simple fact that you’ve thought about it. Anyone looking to invest in your startup will want to see how you will create a great product and platform (if relevent) and most importantly collect good quality data.