An Overview of Start-ups
By: Priya Patel
Tags: Ideas, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur, Startup

A startup is a company or project initiated by an entrepreneur to seek, effectively develop, and validate a scalable business model. Start-ups can be categorized into the following start-ups :

Scalable Start-ups

Usually product companies. Need minimal customizations. Low HR for deployment. Revenue growth is much larger than the proportional headcount growth.

Some examples include a mobile application providing English courses and a firm providing directory service for contacting repair and service personnel care.

Live examples include Airbnb, UrbanClap.

2. Lifestyle Start-ups

A lifestyle start-up is a start-up run by its founders primarily to sustain a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which to enjoy a particular lifestyle.

Lifestyle start-ups typically have limited scalability and potential for growth because such growth would destroy the lifestyle for which their owner-managers set them up. However, lifestyle businesses can and do win awards and provide satisfaction to their owners and customers.

These are firms that depend heavily on founder skills, personality, energy, and contacts. Often their founders create them to exercise personal talent or skills, achieve a flexible schedule, work with other family members, remain in a desired geographic area, or simply to express themselves. But without the founder’s deep personal involvement, such businesses are likely to, well, flounder. Professional investors are therefore rarely involved with lifestyle businesses.

Some examples include a travel writer writing hospitability reviews.

Live examples include RIVIR shoes started by a MICAn and a start-up by Alicia D’Souza that consists of stationery products personalized by Alicia.

3. Acqui-hires Start-ups

Acqui-hires have high potential control, low sustainability and medium strategic control. It is also known as talent acquisition. It is the process of acquiring a company primarily to recruit its employees, rather than its products or services.

Talent acquisitions can provide a relatively favorable exit strategy for employees, with the prestige of being bought by a larger company, combined with the typical process of hiring. Typically, a company that performs a talent acquisition does not show any interest in the products and services of the target, which results in them being discontinued upon the purchase or some time afterward.

Swiggy and Google ranked as a major user of talent acquisitions.

4. Collaborative/Sponsored Start-ups

Collaborative start-ups have medium strategic control, potential return, and sustainability. The collaboration between large corporations and startups is more important today than ever, and the trend will continue.

Collaboration between Corporates and Startups is the process of how to manage coupling/decoupling in all its potential complexity. Viewed as a process of coupling/decoupling, the Corporate-Startup collaboration is seen as an active process whose parameters change, sometimes dramatically, over time. It can proceed from loosely to tightly coupled in the case of a startup being increasingly brought into a corporation from the outside. Or it can involve the opposite in the case of an independent startup emerging from within a corporation.

A live example includes General Motors overtaking PowerMAT wireless charging.

Too much information in one post. Thank you for reading.