Mistakes I did while starting a new business which buried it to the ground.
By: Sufiyaan Rajput
Tags: Startup Life, Startup, Product, Business, Startup Lessons

Market Research and Validation:

Entering with your product or service without market research or market validation can cost you a great deal of time and money.

You model your business truly based on your assumptions and guts. Doing what you feel is fair and good without understanding the needs of your users. In most cases, only to realise that you’ve burnt your hard earned money and the market is not accepting it.

You also loose time to design a product or service totally based on what you think the users need. This can break your motivation and enthusiasm if things don’t turn out like you’d imagined.

Start by doing a market research which shall give an answer or a huge hint if there is even a market for what you are offering.

You wouldn’t jump in water without first learning about it, would you? Information like depth, is it safe etc. Same applies to your market. If there are really people looking for your solution. If there are then what are they willing to pay, your competition and how they are performing. Your competitors revenue can give you a glance about the scope in the market for your product or service and how the current market is reacting to it.

This will also help you make good product decisions because instead of assuming what you think, you have realistic data.

Now if there’s a market, you need to validate to understand how much of it is true. In our water example, this is the time where you step into the water to test your research.

Market validation is a technique wherein you get your idea out there to your target audience, and try to get the actual numbers and data. For instance: People who are actually ready to listen to your offerings.

This can be done through a basic working prototype of your product or even a landing page.

You can ask for visitor’s email if they are interested. If they share their emails then the chances are more where they may open up their wallets for you too.

Relying on team members:

Photo by Clayton Cardinalli on Unsplash

As we were working on one of our products, I told my co-founder that I have a tester and he committed a business development person from his end. We relied on them and they said they were ready. We knew them personally.

When the MVP was ready which took us a while and efforts. The tester stopped picking calls and replying to communications. The co-founder later barged in with the news that the business development guy has stopped responding too.

Don’t know about the tester and still no communication yet but the B.D. guy later replied and said he was out with his girlfriend. We had to drop him.

We were left with no tester and B.D. as he was supposed to take it further from here.

Lesson here is never rely too much on anyone and learn some of their work yourself so you can manage it when you get caught up in such situations. Another point to take away is people do abandon the project when there’s no money running in.

They have a short vision and don’t realise that these things take time to get the traction you expect. There is a lot of effort and years of work even behind the overnight success stories we hear.

I hope you’ve got some takeaways from my mistakes and they were helpful to you.

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