Many entrepreneurs know that starting a business is anything but easy, especially when you are still at college. Besides a good idea for the business, you will need a lot of dedication, time and effort to launch your company. Still, it is not impossible. Many big entrepreneurs like Facebook’s owner Mark Zuckerberg started their ventures during the college days and managed to get to the top. Find out how you can start a personal business while you are still in college in this article!
Scout and organize the customers
The very first thing you need to do is to perform scouting and investigate the customer’s base. You need to determine who is going to be your target audience before you launch the company. Once you do, you need to sell your product! Depending on your type of product and service, it is very likely you will start small but as a small company, you need to sell your product! Do not spend too much time on building the product, as you are still a small company that is trying to find its place on the market.
Once you define the customer’s base, you will know how and what to do with your product. Failing to define your target audience will not give you any success as you do not have the potential customers. Therefore, invest some time in the search. Once you gather your audience and find out about their habits, wishes, and requirements, you will have a better insight into the potentially profitable offer. If there is some trade fair, you can use it to scout your customers and see what they want to have and use.
Create a prototype
As we said that you do not need to invest a lot of time in making the product/service perfect, we thought of making a decent prototype that will show your product. Avoid investing a lot of money into prototyping as you do not know whether your audience will like and use the product. People like to have a product in their hands, no doubt. However, it is not crucial to building the product. You can make a simple brochure to present the basic concept of a product, and you keep track of the reactions of people.
The brochure should present the final product so the people could know what to expect. Therefore, it is important to include your email and contact in the brochure so anyone interested could contact you and find out more. Find a good graphic designer for designing the brochure. If people start talking about the product and like it, you are doing it right. The prototype is the best way to show off what you plan to offer and on top of that, it is not expensive as the final product is.
Launch a website
Once you come up with the prototype, the next step is to launch a website where you will talk about the product in detail, so the customers could gather more information. You can use Wix.com to launch your website – you can create a single landing page where you will write all about your product. There are a lot of strategies for presenting the product. One of the best ways is to create a compelling video that explains the purpose of your product, as the customers want to find out what is it about in a few minutes. Of course, you will write a text that explains everything, but creating a video increases the chances of catching more customers.
You must keep track of your website’s visits and requests, right? Therefore, you will need to install Google Analytics to keep track of all visitors, clicks and other information that are valuable to you. It will help you to understand your customer’s habits. Not only you will know the number of potential customers, but you will also know what they like and what they do not like about your product. It might be needed to pay for similar services, but do not save money on the research, as it will pay off later.
Present your business
The next step in the process of starting a business in college days is presenting your business. Whether you run a clothing store or online tutoring service like tutor.com reviews, you will have to present your business at some moment to the audience. Try to get to a tradeshow or a trade fair. These are places where you will find customers very likely and if you do not succeed in the first try, do not give up. It is a hardworking process that pays off at the end, so never lose patience.
One of the good ways to attract customers is to engage in conversation with them. You explain to them a problem that you are trying to solve with your product and ask them whether they have that problem. If they do, you have got yourself a customer! If they do not, proceed further and ask someone else. Ask until you find 10-20 people who are interested in your work.
Engage with customers
COCA or Cost Of Customer Acquisition is the most important metric in the business and it says how much money a company has to pay to get a new customer. So once you find your customers ready to try out your product, hand them the product for free and do not think about charging them! In this way, you are literally buying a customer. Try to get their names, addresses, and emails so you could send them the promotions and invitations in the future. This is how you build up your client’s list and increase your customer base.
Offer them a free product every time you create a new one and attract them to start following you. It may be a bit expensive in the beginning, but this is the best way to engage with your customers. They want to have confidence in you. This form of engagement renders you as a serious and responsible company that takes care of the customers and works transparently.
Work it to the end
The last part is to finalize your business and actually offer the real product to your clients. Of course, the previous phase might involve giving them free items, but this is also the time when you want to gather people. Collect all data and present the idea to an investor. If the investor likes the idea, he is going to be delighted to invest money into your idea. Once he invests, you are good to go and your job is to finalize the product and make it available!
