| > In short, how to start a successful startup? and > advice on how not to fail don't go together. You're going to fail. Boy, you're going to fail. Again and again. But that's fine. Only charlatans will say you can go from zero to success in a straight line. The most important thing you can do is anticipate this in advance and keep going. Each failure is an opportunity to be less wrong, and that's when you will begin to see success. So practical advice: 1. It takes a day or so to build a webpage that communicates your idea and collects emails. Do that and publish it to the usual places. Ask for and measure the feedback. Listen to what people say. 2. The technology does not matter. The value you bring does. I mean don't choose something awful but also don't get caught up in the minutia of what framework to use. As long as it works, nobody cares, least of all your customers who depending on the business may not even know (and certainly don't care) what an if statement is. 3. Think in systems. Online business is like lego: you connect a lot of systems together and, voila, you've (hopefully) built something of value. Write down what your systems are - backend, frontend, customer support, payments, customer acquisition, monitoring. Write down how your business operates as if you were going to wake up with amnesia tomorrow. It's important. 4. Go to Producthunt and look at the sea of new apps released today. Dozens. Hundreds maybe. If you can't at least match them in design or value, don't start. The days of Bootstrap themes are over. You need good design. Luckily you can simply inspect element and copy what works. 5. Marketing matters. Find out where your potential customers hang out and show them how you're going to solve their problems. Reddit, Youtube, Quora, Twitter, wherever....search them out and give them your product for free. Take their feedback and iterate. You're looking for the first person who says "I love this". Once you hear that, you know you're onto something. 6. Work hard. Your evenings and weekends belong to your business now. You've just given birth to a baby with a bleak chance of survival - do everything in your power to nurture it to good health. It's going to be exhausting and demanding but you're a parent with responsibilities now, that's irrelevant. Good luck. |