Do you have a burning urge or unique idea to start a company? Are you a startup and you are concerned about how you are doing things? Well, you are not alone. Here are some hard-earned knowledge shared by some founders. It highlights some of the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.
Starting a company with a mission and purpose
– Rich Thornett and Dan Cederholm, Co-founders of Dribbble
Find your niche
“I’d say the best advice would be just to get started and once you find something, focus and execute. Don’t try to be everything to everyone right away. If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. From a narrow niche of IT professionals who were our early target market, we now have a wide variety of customers.”
– Christian Reber, Founder and CEO of 6Wunderkinder
Nothing is impossible
“Never take no for an answer. Starting a startup isn’t easy and there will always be people who tell you that something is impossible. Don’t listen. When I started Shapeways, complex software needed to be built and when I first reached out to developers, a lot of them laughed and told me it was impossible. I never took no for an answer and eventually found a great team that helped me build what Shapeways is today. Always push for yes! “
– Pete Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways
Underestimating your potential
“Probably the biggest mistake we made early on was not believing the business was going to be a big success. So we did next to no planning ahead, instead just making decisions as they were convenient.”
– Collis and Cyan Ta’eed, Founders of Envato
Plan while you can, launch as soon as possible, and make changes as you go
“And, just do it! Planning and modeling out your business is always a good idea, but don’t get stuck planning too long, build something and push it out to your users as fast as you possibly can. If your product is getting good reviews and people are willing to pay for it, you’ve got something.”
– Levi Cooperman, Co-founder and VP of Operations of Freshbooks
Finding the right team
“Finding, motivating, and retaining good people has always been a challenge. I think we’ve done a good job at this and it shines through in Simple’s product and customer experience. I don’t have much wisdom to share beyond acknowledging that it’s difficult. One tip I can offer is to be incredibly passionate. Hopefully your passion will inspire other like-minded people who are smarter than you to jump on board.
“Hire great people… then get out of their way. You should strive to hire people who are smarter than you and, if you succeed, they will get irritated when you get in their way. Delegate and keep your eye on the important stuff.”
– Shamir Karkal, CFO and Co-founder of Simple
Listening to your users/customers
“Customer feedback has been critical to our success from the beginning. We occasionally would push out features that were a bad user experience and made our service worse not better and our users told us right away when something was wrong. In fact, our first version included a feedback form upon logout and that along with phone calls gave us plenty of information to learn from. The key in those early days (and even now) was to be nimble and open to feedback.”
Watch your pennies, but spend the good ones
– Collis and Cyan Ta’eed, Founders of Envato