Every technology enthusiast entering Silicon Valley pursues a goal of becoming a bank-making start-up. Every new start-up emerging at any business horizon thirsts for catching the eyes of venture capital firms and ending up huge. Yet reality bites and most ideas remain funded by nothing but the aspiration to win.
Here at 13chats we are sure the power of self-belief can do miracles when setting up a business. But so do a couple of other principles. Being a start-up ourselves we know the meaning of starting small despite your lofty plans. We have outlined three basic rules that helped us to actually start and which can easily fit into any start-up philosophy.
1. Start simple.
While finding all the funds for your start-up needs might leave you biting your nails, we suggest picking up obvious solutions from under your feet.
Test your hypothesis and experiment with the help of simple and accessible tools. Good if they are cheap. Perfect if they are free. Build your website on a website building platform rather than a customized CMS. So what if your website doesn’t have a unique domain name? It’s not the waiting that kills, hesitating does. Take advantage of new technologies, test finance management tools, use free email marketing platforms, create landing pages on free website builders.
Use available chatbot builders to connect with your audience and get to know their pains, needs and interests and this way shape your ways for further development. Become social media friendly and you will see that advertising your brand isn’t as money consuming as you thought.
Study grant opportunities and message companies who tend to invest into start-ups. Yet remember: once corporations invest in you, they expect to see their money back and multiplied as soon as possible. So don’t waste your time waiting for perfection — rather prepare to take risks, fail, change your methods, give crazy ideas a go, and start all over again. Time is on your side if you’re breathing your dream.
2. Move around.
Spread a word about your brand at themed events — conferences, meetups, hackathons, summits. In fact, a Web Summit 2019 was a starting breakout point for our product. We demonstrated our chatbot to the visitors, they tested it and shared their immediate feedback, prompting us vectors for improvement.
Also we were often approached by people seeking for solutions we were not able to satisfy. However, this communication filled us up with ideas, new contacts, and gave us some good marketing food for thought.
Use any available chance to pitch your project: be a speaker in conferences, organise webinars, run demos of your project. This way you will attract more users to your product, be able to hear their opinion and work on the existing features to improve and new features to develop.
Even though the pandemic might have limited our freedom of travelling, it has surely erased the limits for communication and networking. Online conferences ruled the world in 2020 and continue being the main collaboration source for businesses these days. So now you can present your product right from your couch and get your first clients from another continent straightway. Yes, coronavirus, impossible is nothing! 🙂
3. Be open, fearless…
… and single-minded. Meaning never back out of your goals; stick to your principles. When you believe in what you’re doing, you pass on the sparkle to others — investors, prospects, new team members. You might not have all the functionality abundance at once or an office downtown. Your staff might be 10 Jack-of-all-trades people, but hey, you’re a start-up right? Building up progress takes time and patience. Just keep on working, detect what generates good results, improve it, and go on to explore new ways to perfect your product. And remember to sleep in between. 😉
Like no other we understand that each customer counts these days. So in our turn we in 13chats offer to set up a website live chat and a Facebook chatbot for your start-up for free. And in case no one has told you today — we believe in you!
