Three Rules of Startup Success

(This interview and article was originally published in Startuplanes.com)

Owning a startup, in itself, is challenging. Add to it the pressure of sustaining in the market, volatile economy, and generating a strong customer base. All of these are reasons enough why so many startups fail.

StartupLanes organized a Founder’s Meet for emerging startups and was thrilled to have Mr. Rajesh Srinivasan onboard. Rajesh is a marketing advisor to CEOs and Founders and based on his extensive experience and research with startups, he shares three rules behind a successful startup.

Rajesh begins by talking about the challenges faced by most startups and divides them into two major categories:

A plethora of offerings: Srinivasan points out that the primary reason behind the failure of most startups is offering several products, features, or addressing too many customer segments. The basic goal of a startup should be to sustain itself in the market and build a strong customer base.

Ineffective planning and research: He says that conventional strategic planning and market research to evaluate the success of a startup is usually ineffective and requires different methodologies.

Once a startup is past these two challenges, Srinivasan shares his 3 golden rules to ensure that your startup is successful.

Rule 1:

Choose a minimum viable market: This framework is called the idea of diffusion. Any idea reaches the mainstream market only after coming across innovators and early adopters. Srinivasan suggests choosing a minimum viable market to focus on these innovators and early adopters. This will help you to connect better with your customers and take the market to the center-stage. By offering several products/ features, not only will you be wasting a lot of resources, but your growth rate would also be reduced.

Rule 2:

Test your hypothesis: When you choose the early adopters and the minimum viable market for your product, it becomes easier to test your hypothesis in real-time with these adopters. It gives you an understanding of how good is your product for that particular market segment.

Rule 3:

Choosing a growth engine: After establishing your target audience, market segment, and the ideal product for the segment, you must choose the right growth engine to suit your product/ market segment. There are three types of growth engine– Sticky, which enables you to become close to the customer so they become loyal to your product; Viral, wherein you customer spread the word and draw more customers; and paid, where you use advertising as the primary tool to market your product.

Rajesh advises avoiding anything that doesn’t add value to your company or your customers. Simplifying your growth strategies will boost your growth.