We met up to chat about an idea of mine. Although I have everything inside my head, including how exactly the business will work, how the revenue will come, how the website will look like and how users will interact with one another, Lionel still offered me some great advice for my business.
Being a mathematician and someone who doesn't take a problem lying down, he showed how one without knowledge of computing can learn and achieve so much in such a relatively short period of time. I respect him for that.
And having had consulting experience for online businesses before, he clearly and confidently impressed me with his logical presentation of ideas and business. For those of you who wants to start up a company, do consult the advice from Lionel which I'm going to show below. Though generic, it's great questions you need to ask yourself when working on a startup.
1. What is the goal of your business?
I understood this as "What do you want to achieve with your business?" This is where you need to write out the mission and vision of your business clearly. Make no mistake here with the word clearly. You've got to write out exactly what it is and it has to be focused and specific. Just look at Google's mission statement:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
I'd like to add something very important here. I wrote an article on business positioning two weeks ago. Because your mission and vision will guide your business in all that you do, you've got to be clear about "What Problem do you want to solve?", or how big your business is. In my article, I advocate, especially for online businesses, to grow big first fast and then lap up the rest, as opposed to growing a little by little.
2. Objectives
I understood this as the targets you set for your company's growth. Again, this has to be very specific and this time measurable. For example, you want to have 10,000 people signed up for your service in 3 months; and you want 80% of these users to interact with at least another user within 3 months; or you want to generate 20% of all Singapore's online traffic in one year's time. Some of these can further be sub-divided into smaller categories. For example, you might prefer that 70% of your users are working adults and the rest students.
To be specific about goal setting, I find that the time tested management tool of SMART works best here. Every goal that you set must be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Tangible
3. Resources
The above two points are about you asking yourself WHAT exactly you want to do. Having thought about what you want to do, the next is to find out what resources you have on hand to help you towards your business goals.
Think about the most obvious resources you have:
Yourself - and your brain, drive, determine, expertise, etc
Money - how much money do you have or can source
People - Who do you know who can help you or are willing to help you? This can also include businesses who may have an interest in what you're offering. How about the government and public services who also may have an interest?
Personally, I think these are all you need. What you need to do now is to muster these resources to help you in your quest.
4. Business Plan
So ok, you know what to do and the resources that can help you, you know need to know exactly what steps you need to take to achieve your goals. This is where having a business plan will greatly help you.
My post, Part 3 of My Story, will give you some excellent suggestions on how to approach a business plan.
But for now, you'll need to know what products and services are you offering to your users. What is it about these products and services that makes you different from the others? Even if you have no competitors, find some companies who offer similar products and services in other industries.
Next, you need to know how it will look like on your website. You need to know how each part links to the next, where each hyperlink will jump to and how you want to present your information.
If you're not a techie and you can't afford to spend big time to get a full site up, here's a great advice from Lionel. Get a web graphics designer to design an initial page of how your website will look like. You've got to pay but not much. The good thing is you can now show people how your idea will look like on a webpage and you can take your discussions / negotiations further. That's practical and can be easily done and it doesn't really cost much.
I believe these four points will be helpful to any one of you starting up a business. You can read more about my own experience and advice to starting businesses here. If you do need help in crystallizing your business concepts or ideas, you can always talk to Lionel or myself.
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