Article Contributed by Cristian Ángel
In order to efficiently take the first steps of transforming an idea into reality through an entrepreneurship, there are key issues that we must consider in order to raise our few possibilities of success in the medium and long term. According to small business growth expert and entrepreneur Carl Hall, these key issues include creating management structures and sales forces that clearly understand the company’s culture and strategy, as well as technical innovations at every level of company operations.
I’m sorry to tell you in such an honest and direct way that a “brilliant” idea only is of no use. We must understand as from day one that the idea by its own has no value, and on the contrary, the implementation means everything!
As in any other area of a job, there are key requisites that will determine the success of failure of our project. That is why I would like to share which are the essential aspects to start correctly with an online entrepreneurship.
1) The differential must be at home (no matter what!)
I constantly hear this famous phrase at meetings, conferences, talks and lunches of entrepreneurs: “do you know where I can hire a good programmer?” This is the first wrong requisite.
It’s not that we don’t need a programmer. On the contrary, we need one, and a lot! This is why we must think of the possibility of hiring a developer. We should consider making him an integral part of the entrepreneurship.
None of these are important. To start with, our system can even be slow or have a design that is not that tidy. The real key to success is to solve a real problem that the client is willing to pay to have it solved.
Are we on the right track? Let’s leave the computer, look for our potential clients and sit them in front of the system that we are developing. Let’s see how they interact with it without making any comment, just watching. Towards the end we ask them if they would be willing to pay for that service, not if they would use it. If the answer is positive and they want to pay for it, then we are on the right track.
If the answer is negative, then we must, as it is known today, “pivot.” We must listen to our clients to find out what it is that they really want, what their problems effectively are and adapt our software to their needs. Nobody will know what the clients need better than themselves, not even us (the founders of our own entrepreneurship.)
Why should we ask if they would pay for it instead of asking if they would use it? In time we will understand that in almost 100% of the cases, people will congratulate us and answer that they would use it when ready. The truth is that they don’t want us to have a bad image of them. That is why they try to be kind, nice and positive. But when we ask them if they would pay for it and invite them to sign a service contract (for example, for 3 or 6 months), no matter how cheap it may be, it ends with any kindness and we’ve got the answer we were looking for with effectiveness.
The idea for this requisite is to avoid the BIG mistake of developing something that we “think” would be useful and when it is done and we go out to sell it, we realize we’ve lost all of our money, time and effort without any sense.
3) Rising to the next level
Once the two previous requisites are covered, we start with this one. This last requisite consists in making our entrepreneurship grow into a medium and long term enterprise/company.
For that, we need to understand how the online world works and to find the key point in which we can define the distribution channel of our service for the mass generation of our clients with the objective of raising our revenues (invoicing.)
There are a lot of mechanisms through the Internet, from social network marketing, affiliate marketing, search engine marketing (Google, Bing and Yahoo) to even ads display.
In a case like ours that we started with our own resources (no external investment) and we go on in that way, what gave us best results was working through SEO (Search Engine Marketing) for the generation of new clients for our start-ups.
An excellent resource to begin and use is the SEOMOZ community, in which tutorials, guides and explanatory videos about SEO are offered. I recommend this because we must first learn what SEO is about and then we should implement it, and finally, measure the results.
This marketing mechanism is not learnt over night and, in addition, it constantly changes; the strategies that worked last year might not work this year. Lastly, the results are not seen overnight; it requires effort and dedication over time to be able to reach excellent achievements. But definitely, effort and tidy work in this medium bring highly valuable rewards.
About the Article
Article written by the online developer, Cristian Ángel for elMejorTrato in Argentina, now expanding to Brasil, Mexico and Colombia.