Those who are thinking about launching a startup , but cannot decide on this, I can say that all the paths are still open. You can start a successful business today, it's realistic. There are full of empty niches with cheap entrance. There are many startups that were launched on their knees, and the ideas for them were suggested by some analogues. For a long time working with startups, I made three important conclusions that can be useful in starting a successful business.
Tip # 1: Do it!
The main thing that distinguishes any successful startup from the unsuccessful one is that the founder is doing something. If you sit and do nothing, then nothing will happen. It's even more important than thinking. If you look at the list of unicorns (companies with an estimate of more than $1 billion) for 2018, then about every second implements the trivial idea.
Here are some examples. Oyo Rooms is an Indian hotel chain that helps organize online marketing and attract customers. DoorDash - a food delivery service from restaurants that was not afraid to launch when the delivery market was already moving to a mature stage, and proved profitability. Meicai is a Chinese marketplace that makes it easier for restaurants and farmers to buy and sell. AiHuishou - a service for buying and reselling with the mark-up of used phones. PolicyBazaar - insurance marketplace.
Each of these projects is already worth more than $1 billion and was launched recently. Moreover, in some countries there are not even their clones.
Tip # 2: Think about business, not code
People are often frightened by technological complexity. The founder is afraid that without special knowledge in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning and so on, he will not be able to realize the idea. But technology often does not play a significant role in the success of business, this is how unicorns are doing, cited as examples above. They do not use any space technologies, and they are not the essence of business, especially at the start. You can start without being a programmer and not understanding anything about it. Many say that successful companies are often created by programmers - Gates, Zuckerberg, Breen, etc. However, you can look at this differently: many smart people strive to become programmers, this is an intellectual and fashionable profession with a great quantity of mathematics. And at the same time, smart ones are drawn to success, perhaps this is the case.
Even when a business is already big, IT does not determine competition. So, large taxi aggregators with complex algorithms, which hundreds of programmers work on, compete with local taxi services, which are far from so technological. At the same time, they compete with price policies, and not with improving technologies. Even the newest technologies that have just emerged do not solve the success of the business.
Tip # 3: Take only the right investment
The right investments are investments received at the right time, from the right investors, in the right size. We must remember that taking money is difficult, you take a lot of risks when you take investments. It should be a very conscious step and a choice of how much, when and from whom. The natural desire of the founder is to get as much investment as possible for growth, and this desire is spurred by the difficulty of obtaining them.
The example of Yandex shows well that large investments allow you to win the market of competitors who have little money. However, too much investment can be disastrous for the company. A very striking example of this is the history of the American company Beepi. At the beginning of the development , she managed to get investments of $150 million with an estimate of $500 million, much higher than fair. When the money ran out, the founders went for a new round. A reasonable estimate by that time had grown to $200 million, and the founders wanted $1 billion, and the attempt ended in failure. The founders decided to lower the rate, which alerted investors and eventually brought the negotiations to a standstill. The company did not survive, and all because the founders initially took too large an investment with too high an estimate.
Another good example is the history of the American company Blue Apron, which delivers kits for independent cooking on recipes. The audience was relatively small, but the company grew in target niche and attracted another investment with a rather large estimate of $2 billion. Investors decided that with such an assessment, it is necessary to expand the target market by telling all Americans about the service offered by Blue Apron and setting up an aggressive advertising and marketing campaign. So, the company began to attract a large number of low-quality customers who, inspired by obsessive advertising, tried the service, but did not return for it again, because they did not need such a service. At the same time, profitability and the business economy fell, because huge funds were spent on advertising. The company showed formal growth, as the number of trial users increased. To support growth, Blue Apron gave more and more advertising and received increasingly poor-quality users who left even faster. As a result, Blue Apron held an IPO, but raised only $600 million. The investor, who came with the wrong understanding of the market and influenced the company's policy, very much hurt this business.