For an entrepreneur, launching a startup begins with the creation of something from nothing. This creation should take into account what an individual is passionate about and this can beRead More
The post 5 Popular Ways Entrepreneurs Can Launch A Startup appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>For an entrepreneur, launching a startup begins with the creation of something from nothing. This creation should take into account what an individual is passionate about and this can be done by listing the items and prioritizing them to help an individual remain focused on their idea.
When launching a startup, an entrepreneur must make sure that he or she stands out from the crowd especially because of the large number of new businesses that are launched every year. This is the reason that a successful launch is necessary to help an individual have a strong social proof, build a user base rapidly and improve the chances of long-term growth.
The following are five popular ways entrepreneurs can launch a startup:
The target market chosen should be an industry that is growing fast, big and profitable. The selected market can then be won by differentiation where a business gives customers more of what they want and this boosts their willingness to pay or a business that serves as a low-cost producer and charges the lowest price in the industry. When customers buy the products, the entrepreneur should monitor the changing customer needs as well as new technologies and figure out other additional products to build as well as fresh markets to conquer.
The competition should be studied through the performance of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis. A list of businesses that offer services and products similar to the one being launched should be done, a review of the marketing materials which includes brochures and ads should also be done.
The marketing tactics and strategy should also be chosen. This involves the sales as well as the marketing channels that can be used which include online, catalog or using dealers. Multichannel marketers usually achieve great success because customers like it when they can shop when and however they like.
Knowing the product’s life cycle is important because the campaign used during the introduction as well as education phase of the service or product needs to be updated as the service or product matures. An entrepreneur should monitor the marketing results carefully so as to notice any diminishing returns that indicate when to revise the service or product, alter the media message or phase out the particular offering.
This is important so that people can start signing up to receiving emails from an email list. This should be done before the official launch. Email is important because it can get people engaged as well as convert them into customers. For the email list to work an entrepreneur must get their contact list together, this can be done by downloading contacts from those on the email or from people spoken to. This data can be put in a customer relationship management system. Emailing people directly with the launch announcement is more effective than posting it on social media.
Having a large list of motivated and qualified email subscribers is important if the business is to grow. This list can be built by using list building strategies as follows:
> The list can be built with article marketing where the content is taken from the entrepreneur’s blog or website and is then submitted to article directories.
> Videos can be used to build the list because videos help to authentically connect with the people who visit the entrepreneur’s site and allows engagement in a compelling manner. Videos also allow an individual to interact with prospects better.
> Pay-Per-Click advertising can be used in list building and is one technique that can attract many ideal as well as highly qualified leads consistently.
This list dictates the number of clients and customers that sign on and this affects the income of the business.
For an individual to optimize their website, it is important that they give the right kind of information that will grab people’s attention as well as leave an element of mystery that will generate curiosity. The content on the website should be useful, link-worthy and entertaining as this increases the chance of the start-up being discovered. Assess the type of content the competition is creating and use gaps in the content as an opportunity to deliver something the competitors have missed or are lazy to perfect. Keywords should be worked into the posts and the blog optimized for the search engines.
Having a page that is a basic “Coming Soon” page, can be used to entice people to sign up. Offering a special bonus can be an effective way to get early subscribers. Make social sharing an important part of your website and lead generation plan as well.
The sign-ups should be monitored on a daily basis and this should be set up in a way that an email is received every time someone signs up. This can be used to send the person a follow-up thank-you note.
Attracting clients consistently requires that the entrepreneur’s marketing message be clear and stand out. When this message is clear, the marketing plan will be so much easier as well as less costly. To communicate regularly it is important to engage the audience immediately. This can be done by sending out emails regularly, as well as offering people something that will be useful to them with each message. This is one way to keep them signed up, and respond positively to the launch. Have email programs that will allow the set up of “autoresponder” sequences that enable the automatic sending to people a particular set of messages once they sign up.
The emails can offer sneak peeks concerning the progress of the business, industry news, fun quips and also how-to.
To launch a startup successfully, align it with relevant companies that have significant reach. With that being said, it is very important that an entrepreneur looks for opportunities in brands that will complement their product offering and provide unique value for the customers. Build relationships with people regarded as influential in the industry. This will open the business to powerful resources, endorsements as well as introductions to other key influencers in the industry.
The Startup Survival System by Kurt Won
New Business Next Steps by Ann Hawkins
Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months by Melinda Emerson
Startupland by Mikkel Svane
100 Days of Growth by Sujan Patel
The post 5 Popular Ways Entrepreneurs Can Launch A Startup appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail Introduction In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations whereRead More
The post A Preview of Exponential Organizations with Salim Ismail appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail
In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations where he shows you how any company, from a startup to a multi-national, can become exponential.
In his book, Ismail unveils years of research learning how organizations can accelerate growth through the use of technology. The goal of the book is to provide you with the knowledge to leverage assets such as big data, communities, algorithms, and new technology to achieve performance ten times better than your competition.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need a guide for harnessing and strategizing the hyper growth of a company that feeds off of modern technology in the 21st century and beyond.
Because we focus on accelerating technologies and the future we identified an inflection point in how we build businesses that has never noticed before.
You can jump in as needed but I would suggest reading the first two chapters first because it lays the premise and basis of the book.
As we finish the book the core economic basis of these new exponential organizations kind of bubbled up. When you are building and running a business you are worried about money and cost of supply and worried about cost of demand. The internet allowed us to drop our cost of demand exponentially.
We open chapter one basically by saying the world is moving exponentially quicker. As we digitize things we hop onto what we call Moore’s Law and the pace of change moves very, very quickly at an accelerating pace. Where we saw computers move at this pace over the last 50 to 60 years based on Moore’s Law we’re not seeing six, seven or eight technologies hop onto that same curb. The first chapter is to give a hard reality check that the world is moving more quickly than we’ve ever seen it before and we give some specifics on how that works.
The second chapter talks about our organizational structures and the fact that how we organize ourselves is very linear and has been for a long time. All of our businesses have inherited a local and linear characteristic where if you had twice as big of a farm you need twice as many people to farm it. We are seeing today that an information based environment actually accelerates and doesn’t just stay linear. We are seeing new organizations that are scaling at an accelerating rate and not just as a multiplier. In this chapter we teach you how to make your organization adapt to this new accelerated pace.
Chapter three looks at the five externalities of these organizations and I open this chapter by saying all these exponential organizations have one single visionary mission statement characteristic. Each has what I call an MTP (Massive transformative purpose). Chapter three continues to describe five externalities and map onto the acronym SCALE. S stands for Staff on Demand. C stands for Community and Crowd. The A stands for Algorithms. The L stands for leveraged Assets. And the E stands for Engagement.
Chapter four dives into the five internal control mechanisms that these organizations are using to manage and track themselves. This maps on to the word IDEAS. The I stands for Interface Processes. The D stands for Dashboards. The E stands for Experimentation. The A stands for Autonomy. And the S stands for Social Technologies. What we found is if you implement four out of the 10 attributes that we described in chapter three and four you will get to the 10x level.
Chapter five summarizes all of it and explains the implications of this new model. This chapter goes through a whole set of implications about how to think about the future.
The second half of the book, chapter six to chapter ten, explains how to apply it. Chapter six is about how to apply this to a startup. And when you are starting a company from scratch what sequence to go in. This chapter will give you the specific steps to take to launch a startup with these principles in mind.
Chapter seven is about how to apply this to a midmarket company. There are a lot of midmarket family style businesses that have grown early on but have now plateaued and this is about taking that and blowing it open.
Chapter eight is about how to organize a big company because you can’t take a big organization and turn it in to one of these new animals, it’s too disruptive of a change. What you need to do is take a disruptive set of changes agents that exist in all organizations and build one of these exponential organizations off the edge of your own attacking in another marketplace.
Chapter nine is a set of nine success stories of what big companies are doing.
In the final chapter we talk about the role of the executive in the future.
“Any organization built for success in the 20th century is doomed for failure in the 21st century.” – David Ross
I am the founding executive director and currently global ambassador for Singularity University. Our mission statement at Singularity University is to create a new generation of leadership that can leverage accelerating technologies to solve major global problems. I have been doing this for about six years and was the head of innovation at Yahoo and Tech Entrepreneurship before that.
As we launched Singularity six years ago we noticed at the same time that a very different model has become of how we build organizations. We’ve learned how to scale technology really well but scaling the organization and building that is painfully incrementally and linear. In the last five years or so we are seeing a new breed of organizational structure that can scale in the same seamless way that we scale technology. I noticed that as a weak signal five years ago, started tracking it, and over the last three years we have found over 60 organizations that are scaling at an average 10 times better, faster and cheaper compared to their peers. We started documenting those 60 organizations and tracking them and decided to write a book on the model.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin
Buy Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail on Amazon today
Visit ExponentialOrgs.com take the diagnostic survey and learn more about the book
Visit SingularityU.org to learn more about Singularity University
Follow Salim Ismail on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization by Nathan Furr
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Exponential Organizations with Salim Ismail appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
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