Becoming your own boss and running a business is an exhilarating adventure that promises the independence and freedom that many dream of. But before tasting the life of CEO, you must already know how to create a company.
Creating a business requires great adaptability and organizational skills to work on your brand identity, your business plan, position your product or service, develop a budget, master the legal aspects or even set up a team! Get ready to overcome many challenges!
If you’ve never started a business before, you probably have a lot of fears or uncertainties before you start. Fortunately, many entrepreneurs have taken the plunge before you, and you can benefit from the lessons they have learned from their successes, or their failures.
Whether it’s your first business or your tenth, these twelve proven steps to starting a business will help you along your creative journey, from discovering and validating your idea to launching your business. product or service, to developing your delivery strategy.
To come up with a business idea, you can take a methodical approach based on techniques that have proven successful for other entrepreneurs. Whether you want to start a side business with a very small investment or are going all out with your new concept, the best way to find a product to sell is to start by asking yourself the following questions:
What is the size of the potential opportunity?
Too often, entrepreneurs ignore small markets. Certainly, the size of the market should be appropriate to your business ambitions, but the opportunity for a specific niche is not just about the size of the market. For example, if a product category has relatively few active customers, but the price of the products is quite high and regular purchases are necessary, this is still an attractive opportunity. This is called targeting a niche market. Entrepreneurs focused on market size might miss out.
That said, customer acquisition costs are quite high these days. The markets that represent the best opportunities are those where you can encourage recurring purchases, whether as a subscription or by (eventually) up- selling or cross -selling complementary products. All of these points can be developed later, but keep them in mind during your preliminary work.
Is it a trend, a fad or a booming market?
The future development of a market is more important than its current state. If you want to build a sustainable business, you not only need to understand current demand, but also be able to predict how it will evolve in the future. Is your product or niche a passing fad, a trend, a stable market or a booming industry?