Start Up Plan - Time your actions

As I mentioned in my previous post on start up that things start getting infinitely postponed once the unknown director is missing. So the first important thing in a start up is Start Up Plan. The Start Up plan requires setting up a Goal. As I have mentioned in my Entrepreneurship Basics post. Then the goal needs to be broken up into Long term, mid term and short term goals. Each short term goal has some characteristics. Find out more about them here. Having done this, now you need to map your goal to the actions. These actions will in turn be bound by plans. Now the factors that you should keep in mind for planning:
1. Your own capabilities. Do not over or underestimate yourself. Try keeping those tasks first in which you have some experience. Don’t hesitate from outsourcing or taking help from the right resources when you are not sure about something.
2. Keep flexible timelines in beginning. You can tighten up your schedule as you gain experience with the work.
3. Give time for letting learning curve develop. The better it gets the faster you become.
Now the things you will be required to do for getting a right Start Up in place:
1. As I mentioned set up a SMART goal. Chase the short term goal first. Modularize the goal into set of actions. Bind these actions into time frame, and stick to it.
2. Now comes the concept that gave birth to your start up. This needs to be effectively conveyed to masses. The media for this conveyance is your brand. Your brand represents the soul of your Start up. It’s your brand that actually needs to be promoted.
3. Know who you are selling your products or services to. Find out their purchasing capabilities, the disposable income they possess the requirement for your product or service. Armed with this fact, you can customise your product.
4. Further steps would require your budget in place. Once you have decided the upper limit, you may channelize the budgets proportionately.
5. It’s now the turn for advertisement. This part requires you to know the various media prevalent in the target audience region. You may choose any or all media based on your budget.
6. Now create the benchmarks for you progress. The parameters for success or failure of any step will be defined by these benchmarks as you go ahead
7. Create a plan keeping all the above factors in mind. But keep in mind the “Paralysis of Analysis” adage. Once the start up plan is in place, stick to it.
8. Once the modules start getting implemented, check its progress against the benchmarks you have set. Find out the variance of the actual from projected. This helps in further planning.
Last but not the least; Take all your time to put together the Start Up plan. But once outlined, stick to it against the heaviest of odds.
Note: The concept of the post is derived in parts from http://www.startups.co.uk/ site.

"Too late to go for this kinda Start up"

You said that??? You feel you have a brilliant idea backed by plan, but then there are already established players who are into the sector and that there is no part of market left for you to capture? Wait a second; you need to reconsider your view. If you are a good strategist, you can very well make out that the global market is too big for any one to capture all alone. The market is huge and you never know which section of it may lap up your product or service. Yahoo! Mail is the market leader in its section, but then that never stopped Google to join the league with Gmail and I suppose Gmail is faring well... Isn’t it? Well you may argue that Gmail was backed by Google and that you don’t have even nuts backing you (Gosh you are so pessimistic). Well then here goes a legendary story from Indian software sector, which has now made deep impressions across the world IT community.
Cognizant Technologies (CTS), which is usually termed as “Johnny-come-lately” in India’s IT sector, now features in Top four of the sector, only after Infosys, TCS and Wipro which came in market a decade before CTS. Earlier the companies that ranked with it are nowhere in the league now. There is famous story that every CTS employee loves to narrate. The story goes as... During early days of CTS, there was a lucrative project up for bidding. There were big players bidding for that along with TCS. TCS which was already an established player by then gave the presentation demonstrating it’s credentials and experience in similar kind of project. The clients looked nearly convinced and TCS was all set to take away the project, when Laxmi Narayanan, now the chairman of CTS, came in with his team for a short presentation and went on to say “I know TCS has given a great presentation and that it has demonstrated its experience in the field. But then for I am a product of TCS, my team mates are a product of TCS and the projects and tools which TCS was talking about were developed by us, who are not with CTS” The rest they say was history.
Moral of the story? Irrespective of who you are, what kind backing you have (or for that matter, you don’t have any); if you are clear with your strategy, you have right kind of expertise and experience then there is nothing stopping you. But let me reiterate the three basics... Clear strategy , experience and expertise are a must. Cause in case you venture into a new field with inexperience, you wont be sure of yourself, then how do you expect your clients to be sure of you? Do i llok like making some point here???

Naming a Start Up and Branding

Sources: Kishore Biyani’s “It happened in India”, Internet and my online experiences.

I decide to play safe as I move ahead with my views and ramblings. As such whatever information you have on start ups or for that matter any other issue, you get it from some book, some site or magazine, but then if you write about them people hold you up for Intellectual property rights violation, however if you mention the source you are not offending the cause of the writer, thus this post begins with source’s list. Lest my segment on Start ups (along with the full blog) ends up even before it starts up. However as you can make out, a lot of reading has gone into creation of this article of naming and branding of a start up. (This usually is the case with my other articles too)
Coming to point... Once you have thought of going ahead with a start up, the first thing you do is think of the naming your start up. How ever what immediately crops up in our mind is “Why create so much fuss about naming a Start up and is it all that a serious issue worth a eight hundred word discussion?” I suppose yes it is. As a common man, we commit a serious mistake of ignoring the minute but obvious details of business. My personal learning of this issue comes from my experience with Google Adsense. Once you have an account approved you’ll get know that Google has gone to an extent of minimizing our eye movement as we read through an ad or an article. No wonder Google is a leader in its segment. Talking on same lines, giving a right name to a start up is one such detail. Actually a name is something with which a start up gets recognized with. Mark me when I use the word recognise. Actually the word “Recognize” not only means being known, rather it also refers to the brand that takes the onus of our product or service. Yes, that’s the point I was dying to mention, before naming your start up keep in mind a long term vision of your product or service going places and that it will be known by the brand name you keep now.
Thus a name like “sam’s cafe” or “tom dick and harry consulting” is a strict no no for any kind of start up. Rather a name should be such that it should be able to click some kind of curiosity in the prospective customer’s mind. Always remember that whenever you start up finds a new customer, it won’t be because the customer had a premonition that you have got a great product or service but it will be because of your branding and advertisement. What’s worth noticing here is that the name of your start up plays a prominent role in both brand building and advertisement.
So here are the few characteristics of good name:
1. The sole purpose of a well thought name for your start up should be creating a stir in the brains of customer and at the same time relate closely to your start up’s product or service. Just think, in one day how many advertisements do you come across? How many of them you actually remember? The names you remember would usually fall in two categories. First one, you come across a familiar name and the second one the name clicking the chemical process of thought and logic in your brain. However under any circumstances you will not even bother to recall what product or service the company named XYZ corp had to offer. So as an owner of budding start up I have just one of the two choices left, i.e. Going for a start up name that clicks logic and reasoning in a human brain. Cause becoming a familiar name for everyone is actually not possible for nascent start up.
2. The name should relate directly to product or service your start up has to offer. Don’t ever get emotional enough use your start up for carrying your family name or for that matter your kids’ name. However your name can also be used to carry forward your vision for your business, you society or country or your countrymen. Doing that will certainly endear your product to masses.
Once you have taken care of these two facts, I suppose your brand can have the potential to rename that product or service. Confused??? What the hell do I mean with renaming a product or service? Well then tell me what will you do when you want information on something on internet. Will you search it out or will you “GOOGLE” it out??? That’s what a name is!!!