The idea of starting your own business sounds great but turning it into a reality seems out of the league. Just the term ”entrepreneurship” is enough to scare many people away. But, if you have a proper business plan, you don’t have to stress over launching a business. All you need is a great idea and a drive to make it happen.
Here is the ultimate guide to starting a business and chasing your dream project:
Determine the Business Model
The primary step to begin your entrepreneurial journey is deciding on a business idea and determining the model. You can figure out the idea by thinking about what excites you the most and your expertise.
Is There a Hobby You Want To Turn Into a Business?
Try to write down all the business ideas on a paper and then research about the scope they have. Reject ideas with a saturated market, low demand, or a dying niche. After narrowing down the idea, it’s time to choose the business model.
How Are You Planning to Capitalize on That Idea?
You can consider among the following-
- Freelancing
- Consulting
- Info-products
- SaaS (software as a service)
- Ecommerce for selling physical products
- B2B or B2C
Conduct Market Research
Start with research on your rivals and customers. Try to find a gap that you can fill. Understand what’s working for your competitors and how they survive in the market. Do a detailed study on your customer’s problems, struggles, and behaviors. All of this will help you find a place for your business in the market. You can survey them via telephone, take help from the internet, and interview customers and niche experts.
Create Your One-page Business Plan
While making a one-page business plan, make sure to include:-
- A problem that your business is solving.
- Frame a single-sentence elevator pitch.
- Information about your customers and their buying behavior
- Conduct a SWOT analysis including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that the business has.
- From where you’ll raise funds.
- How you are going to market it out.
- Division of work.
Get Some feedback
After your business plan is ready, it’s time to take the feedback. Now, make sure you don’t hop onto this step earlier, as you won’t understand the advice until you have enough knowledge about all the components. Try to take experts’ feedback and not your close ones because there’s no space for bias here. This is when many ideas get killed and don’t go further. Take logical second opinions and work on them.
Generate Capital
This is indeed one of the most important parts of the business. There are multiple ways to manage business credit and finance to accelerate its growth. You can either go for bootstrapped business where you fund it yourself, take a loan from the bank, conduct crowdfunding on social media, contact the local angel investor group, join a start-up incubator platform or get in touch with venture capitalists investors to take it to the next level.
Register Your Business
Check out the local corporate laws to register your business. Some areas only give registration after making sales, and others allow you to register on day one itself. So, look into what applies in your area. Also, try to arrange the other legal aspects like getting a federal and state tax ID, bank documents, and licensing.
Market Your Business
Now, after grinding yourself in the above steps, it’s time to bring it in front of the people. Marketing is essential to get visibility and sales for your business. You can run ads on different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Quora, Clubhouse, etc. Creating a sales funnel can help you retarget customers and grow your business.