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Stages of Start-up Development: Step-by-Step Guide
POSITIONING
We ensure that your product is well-positioned in the market by conducting market research, competitor analysis, and creating a narrative for your brand. We place a lot of emphasis on storytelling and ensure that the start-up founder’s vision and customer problems/ solutions are narrated persuasively.
SALES
Sales is where all of the hard work comes together—the business model and the business model canvas, business plan, pitch deck, your speech, website, financials, marketing plan, team, corporate culture, and so much more. We are the only stop you need to make to boost your chances to launch your start-up successfully.
Success stories don't happen overnight. You might have heard many stories about successful young individuals who built their million-dollar business empires by the age of 18. However, this happens rarely. A unique idea is worthless if you don't know how to properly shape it.
Whether you have an original business idea or a smart alternative to an existing technology or process, you must cultivate them. A formal approach defines start-up development by its lifecycle stages: early venture, series A, and growth. Each of these covers a range of activities.
The goals of these are:
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Early venture: to prove that a start-up can scale.
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Series A: to initiate scaling processes.
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Growth: to build a base for further expansion and profitability.
You can either rely on these three stages or create your own strategic stages for your start-up.
We came up with a start-up framework consisting of five phases. This is a straightforward way to get from a promising idea to a well-established company.
Successful start-up stages
To succeed, you should know the path you are walking. There are a couple of things to consider during each of these stages:
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Actively search scaling capabilities. You should start planning for future scaling even before you have a working MVP. This will help you to account for many additional features you might need to work on and plan for investments accordingly.
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Have a business plan. You should work on your business plan from the early stages so that you can present your idea to both investors and potential partners.
Document everything that can be documented. This will save time while improving and growing your business in the future.
1. Research
We recommend that your team be focused on strategy and risk management, as well as have a clear vision shared by each team member. Here are two key points to consider during the research stage:
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Have a research plan
A plan should clearly state what must be completed before you start building an MVP. This could be market and competition research, or a potential customer survey.
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Understand your competitive advantage
Study what your competitors are offering and focus on what they are not. No matter how successful their company, you can always find gaps to fill.
2. From idea to MVP
As soon as you have a concept of your future product, focus on validating it. An MVP is a must-have set of features that allows you to test the product with your target audience. The purpose of the MVP is to estimate the practical impact of your product in the real world so that you can perfect it.
Here are the basic steps for creating your MVP:
Define your timeline:
Plan based on your specific features and the size of your team. It is also important to gather customer feedback and measure results as these are as important as detecting and fixing any technical issues.
Make sure you have the right expertise
Regardless of the early financial constraints, an MVP is critical. As an alternative to building the product in-house, consider outsourcing to create the first prototype of your product. You can also hire a chief technology officer (CTO) responsible for MVP creation. This usually works for well-funded companies and products that require dedicated tech expertise.
Ask questions
Don't just wait for people to give you the right ideas. Instead, ask questions that you need the answers to. You can use a short survey or run a series of user interviews to get refined feedback. The ideas you gather will be very helpful to develop your product further.
3. Getting traction
During this stage, you will start acquiring your first customers. Focus on enriching your customer base while continuing to collect feedback.
Here are another few tips to consider:
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Branding: Give your product an identity so that it is recognizable across target audiences.
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Promotions: To gain clients, you should address the right audience. Select a few different channels for promotion.
Partnerships and referrals: People tend to trust recommendations more than ads. You might try to search for those that would tell the world about the product or service you created.
4. Improvements
If all goes well, the number of clients should increase. Customers can tell you what they love the most about your product. Leverage their feedback and increase the value of your product as much as possible.
Specifically:
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Get rid of features that don't convert.
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Refine your brand image.
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Invest more in the targeted promo.
5. Aiming for maturity
You should be ready to take bold action and be patient in order to transform your start-up into a mature and profitable business. It is impossible to achieve success overnight, but some tips may be helpful:
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Research partnerships that could give you revenue growth.
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Have a system for ROI (return on investment) measurement.
Ensure that you have tools to measure your success—this will help you maintain positive trends in the future.
Attract funding. Depending on your business history and current valuation as a mature business, you can consider traditional term loans or business lines of credit. Another option is to focus on attracting investors. They can also bring their expertise, which you should leverage.
Summary
To sum up, the key things at the core of start-up growth are planning and persistence. From idea to growth stages, take your product through a series of activities that will help it evolve. Deliver on your clients' expectations instead of trying to kill your weak spots. Understand the start-up essentials, but be ready to tweak them to outperform your competition. Finally, measure everything you do.
Remember that you have everything it takes for a successful journey. Just make sure that you don't jump into things that are beyond your expertise. Leverage start-up development services, hire a CTO or consult people who have gone down this path before. For the last five years, the BVC team has worked with many start-ups representing various industries. We have seen start-ups succeed and have seen them fail, too, and we are ready to share our accumulated experience. Check our reviews to find out more about how we work.
We also transform our experience into helpful articles. Don't miss our content, which can help your product conquer the world!
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