How to Launch a Startup

“Focus on your product. Who it’s for. What it does. Why it matters. Creating a quality product doesn’t come from years of experience. It comes from a laser focused view of the one thing that you and your team are going to do better than anyone else. I’m not a big believer in the ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality, but if you don’t build it really well, they definitely won’t.”

- Suzanne Xie, Founder of Hullabalu

“It’s not about the launch, it’s about what you do immediately after to start the product-to-market fit process. Why? Because you’re definitely not nailing it on the first try.”

- Dan Grunberg of Zozi.com

By MARTIN BRYANT

Successful founders all know one thing: it's more important to serve a customer than it is to build a product.

This is the mindset you must get into when you start out. Most entrepreneurs are narrowly set on building a product that they lose sight of the real goal - to solve a problem for a customer.

Or, as Ben Yoskovitz eloquently put it,

"Customers don’t care how you get things done – just that you get it done and solve their pain."

By: Dharmesh Shah

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

And that's kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.

If there is one message I'd like to get across about startups, that's it. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.  by Paul Graham

Open-source software and cloud computing is the Key.

Silicon Valley is abuzz with ­excitement about low-cost startups. Building a company on open-source software and cloud computing is being hailed as a brilliant fusion of the Valley’s three great virtues—cheaper, faster and better. Take extra whacks at costs via social media marketing, crowdsourced design and offshore engineering, and the perceived gains get even bigger.

By: George Anders

Don't Wait Too Long.

"The biggest mistake I see is companies waiting too long to release the product. It's easy to let the scope of what you're building get out of hand. But equally importantly most startups build much more than they truly need to, but this is often only realized in hindsight. Whether your product is working or not, looking back it's easy to see that you only really needed to build a small fraction of the stuff you built. Most features/options/buttons/settings/etc. simply aren't crucial to success or failure, and for an early stage startup that means.....

By: Lauren Drell

Entrepreneurs have to take risks and make risky decisions on a regular basis. That’s part of the deal. No risks, no rewards. You can argue that risk levels have been considerably reduced these past few years, especially for engineer founders, now that startups can be built from scratch with time and sweat, but they’re still there. Some of the risks and decisions include failure, bringing in a partner, adding key members to the team, adding investors to the capital of the company, product, getting rejected by customers, not meeting customer expectations, bruised reputation, raising too much money, raising too little money, competition, personal life struggles, health problems, etc.

One could argue that the guy who takes his chances and stays on the bike is more likely to swing for the fences, regardless of the situation. This could mean: raise as much money as is available on the best possible terms with a complete disregard to who the investors are, take all the business you can win even if don’t know if you’ll be able to deliver the goods yet....JS Cournoyer

So, not only do you hit the mark on the right geographical location of your promotion, but you also get a grasp on what consumers (with an active email address) interests are. These people may have responded to online surveys that relate to your product and service, which means that they will most likely respond to yo ur email as well.