Ask These 3 Fundamental Questions Before You Do A Startup?

Hey, It’s great to know that you are having a brilliant concept which you would like to develop and carve out a niche business out of it. But hold on have you asked this 2 question to yourself? If not I would require your kind attention please. Because these questions if not asked can lead to an outcome which may be fatal for your business and can become an obstacle going forward.

Thus I Say :The more you put question mark the more realistic you become

So what are those crucial questions which any aspiring entrepreneurs should ask to himself before he plans to jump into this uncertain world of Startup

1. Question No 1Do Anyone From The Founding Team Has Financial Bandwidth To Sustain The Initial Phase ?

Yes, it’s extremely important to asses your financial bandwidth before you even think to jump into starting up and so this question becomes critical for you to ask and until you have an answer for this it is recommended not to burn yourself out. Yes, it may sound so fascinating at the start that you have a billion dollar idea which needs to be developed, but until you have a fuel to sustain the initial f****ng phase, you may blow yourself to the level from where it may become difficult to carry forward.

If you personally don’t have the financial bandwidth you need to team up or buy someone’s interest in your concept. Having money power is the brutal reality. That’s why you can see the successful billion dollar startup trend, most of the founding team had a decent financial background to start with. Yes, there are exceptions, but that number is too low to cite. Most of the success stories have come from the founders(I am citing an example from Indian Startups Who Made It Big) with strong educational & financial background who left their lucrative career with sufficient financial backup & domain knowledge to kick-start their startup venture.

So,

Until you have a strong financial plan in place to smoothly cross that testing and tiring phase you better think twice before starting up, yes, you may get lucky, but the chances of crossing that first 2 years of your startup journey would become extremely challenging without proper financial backup in place

Question No 2:Is Your Founding Team Skilled Enough To Pull It Through ?

I have seen many wannapreneurs who without any required skill-sets, dreams to change the world while they themselves struggled in their professional life . I am not saying that you can’t do it, but the point i am trying to make is that you necessarily need to have a prior knowledge to deliver what you want from your project, or a potential co-founder needs to complement your skill to materialize the startup idea. It happens many times that the founder has the strong communication skill, but not the required technical skill to execute the entire project plan. In that case he needs to first put a visionary tech cofounder in place who can deliver the technology part.

Every startup founder should get their own hands dirty before letting the second layer to take over. Having the required skill-set & experience of the domain in which you are planning to do a startup, has always led to a great startup success story in the past and will continue to produce more successful business venture in the coming future.

Don’t team up with day dreamers who just spend most of their time planning and doing no ground work in learning and executing the art. You will end up burning time, resources and energy in the wrong direction.

Also,If you can’t deliver one part of your business yourself, don’t enter into this startup world you better learn the skills and then think to initiate. Without any prior knowledge and experience, you are for sure going to end up at losing side very often than not.Q3: Is You Product Or Business Market Fit:Your startup success story can only be written if you have done enough market due diligence to understand your product’s, business model viability.

It is paramount that what you are developing has UBP: unique bragging proposition to help your product get the traction with the help of the user’s who will be your product’s brand ambassador.

First, you define the target audience for your product, make a small MVP, do both online and offline market survey to understand what your target audience has to say about your product idea. Do they really need it or not? Will they speak about your product to other people ? You need to define the survey queries which fits to your product need and then analyze the sample data collected using various sampling tools. If not all, you will have some data to help you understand about your product being a market fit or not.

Having said that you should be also be smart enough to assees the current and upcoming market trends and see how your idea fits into this to cater the user problems

One things is for sure if you are solving any unique problems which has yet not been solved you will have an edge and you just need to time your product launch right to harness the opportunity.

Summary:

This article in no way trying to disappoint or discourage you, it is just an observation from my life experiences which I am sharing based on my own success and failures. I may be wrong and I wish that everyone of you who wants to build your dream startup succeed, but reality can be different and I invite you all to have your first hand experience and decide for yourself instead of listening to my advice.

It’s always better to fail, learn and then build, based on that, not so good experience to deliver good and then excellence going forward in your startup journey.

Ask These 3 Fundamental Questions Before You Do A Startup? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.