Focus is the Key to a Successful StartupWritten by Wil Schroter
Focus is key to a successful startup The definition of a startup means you have very few resources to employ and little time to get them to do something valuable. The clock is always ticking, and money (if you even have any) is running out by day. With so little to leverage, you need to make sure that focus of your company's product offer is as razor sharp as possible. Don't be all you can be. Be as little as you can be. Most startup companies fail because they try to be too many things to too many people right from onset. They think of every possible option they could load into their product offer. While this may give them feeling of being one of “big boys,” grim reality is they are not. In fact by trying to be too many things from start, these companies often end up delivering no real value at all. Instead of trying to be all things to all people, try being one thing to all people. Think of PayPal, highly successful startup that allowed users to e-mail money over Internet to each other. PayPal could have chosen a million options for their offer. They could have become an on-line credit card company, an auction site, a loan provider and so on. But what made company successful was their focus on only one offer – e-mailing money from one person to other. PayPal did one simple thing so well that industry giant eBay purchased them for $1.5 billion in 2002, even after eBay had already built same service themselves. PayPal is a great example of a company keeping a sharp focus one doing on thing right even when so many great opportunities could have easily distracted them. Bite off less than you can chew Delivering your product to market is an amazing feat to begin with. Even still, a common problem among small companies is their inability to predict what it will take to actually support a product once it has gone to market. It’s easy to conceive complex products with lots of features. But actually bringing that product to market and supporting its use with customers is a whole different story. Instead of trying to roll out everything and kitchen sink in your approach to market, just roll out sink. If you find that you can support your product just fine after it’s been successfully selling in first year, then go ahead and add to it. It’s a lot easier to add features along way than it is to support features you don’t have resources for to begin with. You have ten seconds to get it right Your customer has a life, even if you do not. They are being constantly bombarded with marketing messages from latest movies releases to newest type of shampoo. They don’t have time or energy to stop their entire day to focus on just your product. So if you are lucky enough to have ten seconds of their attention, you had better make good use of it. The exercise of developing your value proposition in ten seconds is a great way to distill down your feature set to those items that will get people’s attention right away. If it’s not going to add value to ten second pitch, it’s not critical to your product’s success. If you can’t get your customer’s attention with one key benefit to your product, rest of your features will never see light of day to begin with.
| | Laminate Flooring Business - What You Need To After Deciding To StartWritten by E. Timothy Uy
Before reading this article, please note that it was written for people wanting to start their own laminate flooring business in U.S. Therefore, parts of information in this article are useful only for those particular people.After setting up your laminate flooring business plan and locating suppliers, several actions are required to kick off business. First, you need to come up with a name, which you must then register with Secretary of State, unless you are doing business under your own name. This is required so that people can identify who is owner of a particular laminate flooring business. For information on how to register name of your business visit Secretary of State website for relevant forms. In California, website is http://www.ss.ca.gov/business/business.htm. Look for same information for state you want to start up your business in. Next, you need to get is a tax I.D. or a Federal Employer Identification Number (EIN). These are one and same thing. The EIN is required by IRS for identifying employers. It is a must if you have employees. Even if you do not intend to have employeeds, it's helpful to obtain it. An EIN often needed for purchasing supplies and merchandise at wholesale prices. Read IRS publication "Starting a Business & Keeping Records" (www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p583.pdf -page 3).
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