The smartest thing you could to succeed—whether it be in life or in business—is to avoid failure. At all costs. So many people get so immersed in how to get their idea off the ground, yet they forget how to ensure that it wouldn’t become a disastrous failure.
Failing is good, don’t get me wrong, but avoiding it is even better.
Here are 7 things you could do to eliminate the chances of your start-up becoming just another startup failure.
Make an Unstoppable Plan
A plan must always come first. Because that’s what planning is for; to figure out the things that could result in your idea failing and the things that would tremendously increase the chances of your idea or startup taking off and becoming a success.
You must always have a plan, no matter how big or small your startup idea is.
Now it doesn’t have to be a traditional business plan, as things change as you go further with your startup. But you still need a plan. And you need your plan to be thorough, strategic, and actionable.
Don’t get too excited about your idea and just scrapple some lines with your awful handwriting and call it a day. A good plan might take a little over a week to make (including research, finding the right people, gathering the right information, etc), but an unstoppable plan could take much longer than that.
You may hate planning and strategizing, but they are necessary for avoiding startup failure.
Benjamin Franklin said it best, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
Learn and Improve Daily
This advice is quite underrated, yet incredibly valuable. Because—as Brian Tracy said—continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.
You should reach a point, where whenever you remember yourself yesterday, you realize that you’ve learned at least a thing or two more than your past self. That you’ve grown in knowledge and understanding.
It may not be obvious to you, but if you keep learning and improving every day you would have acquired so much knowledge and experience in a short time that many others take years to learn.
Never underestimate the power of continuous learning.
There’s always more to learn. You could learn more about digital marketing, budgeting, accounting, and even your own startup idea.
The main difference between Elon Musk and Average Joe is that Elon Musk knows a whole lot than Joe. And he’s consistently learning and improving his skills, expanding his knowledge, and sharpening his mind.
Thorough Market Research
To sell a product or service effectively, you need to know exactly who you’re selling to.
Who are your targeted customers? What are they like? Where could you find them? What social media apps they like to use most? What are their pain points? Why would they want to buy your product or service?
These are some of the basic questions you need to ask yourself before you venture with your startup idea. These questions will help you create your customers’ personas and learn how to effectively sell to them.
You also need to research who your competitors are and what they’re doing, and you need to figure out what makes your startup different.
Thorough market research is a must when it comes to protecting your startup from becoming just another startup failure.
Listen To the Experts
A huge mistake young entrepreneurs make is not listening to experts’ advice. Either advice they get from someone they know, or they read it somewhere online. Whichever way the advice comes—if it’s from an expert—you need to listen.
A lot of people often get very stubborn, and they forget how ignorant in a topic they could be. An expert is someone who has been where you are; they know the mistakes that you could avoid, the shortcuts, the techniques, and the hows that made them succeed and become an expert today.
92% of small business owners agree that mentors have a direct impact on the growth and survival of their business.
Listening to an expert/mentor and taking their advice into action, is one of the easiest ways to succeed and avoid startup failure.
Find the Right People
I know how obvious this one is, but I believe that repetition is necessary if you want things to stick.
Repetition is also pretty useful when it comes to the stubborn folks.
Basically—however good your startup idea might be—working with the wrong people could result in catastrophic failure.
Statista shows that 23% of startups fail because of having the wrong team.
Having the right team is a necessity when starting a business. That’s why most companies invest a lot in choosing and bringing the right people for their organizations.
So don’t skip this point, learning how to attract the right people for your business will yield you with tremendous results.
Define What Makes Your Startup Different
The competition out there is crazy and ferocious. It’s getting harder and harder to have a new business stand-out.
So how could you stand-out?
By finding, exploring, and defining what makes you and your startup different.
Why should people choose your product or service, over the dozens of others in the market? What makes your startup unique? What could you offer that your competitors aren’t offering?
This is crucial when it comes to eliminating the chances of your startup becoming another startup failure, because people are already bombarded with too many choices. Other people, startups, companies are already offering what you have to offer—some of them might be decades old—so why should customers choose you?
Exercise Daily
I’m pretty sure you didn’t expect to see this one coming. Because what does exercising have to do with startups or businesses’ success or failure? Nothing. It has nothing to do with it—directly—but everything to do with it indirectly.
Let me show you why. As I listed above, learning is quite essential for success and in avoiding startup failure. And studies have proved that exercising boosts your learning power (memory, alertness, thinking skills, etc). Not only that but exercising also highly rises your motivation levels and makes you more energetic.
And being energetic and driven are two things that almost all successful people share.
Overall, exercising will make your mind clearer, more critical, and sharper. It might not be obvious to you, but exercising could provide you with more than just strength and a good shape.
Conclusion
In the end, I want to emphasize that there’s nothing wrong with failure—that you shouldn’t be afraid of it—and that it is inventible to happen for everyone. Take failure as a learning experience and grow from it. And always remember to learn from other people’s successes and failures, to learn the things you need to avoid and what you need to do to succeed.
Now, do you know more things that could result in new startup failure?
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