Did you know only 50% of startups make it to the five-year mark?
If you’re running a tech startup, you might be worried about your business shutting down prematurely. As a result, you may want to learn how you can ensure the long-term success of your company.
Below we’ll cover four ways start up tech companies can ensure ongoing success. If you follow these tips, your business should be around for many years to come.
Let’s begin!
1. Ensure You Have a Good Product
If you want your startup tech company to be a success, you must have a good product. After all, if you don’t have a good product, you may fail, even if you do everything else properly.
Now, if you want to have a good product, you should try to achieve something known as ‘product-market fit.’
Essentially, this means your product is a perfect solution for your target audience. Thus, if you want to get to this point, you need to understand your target audience and what they want.
You can develop this understanding by speaking to your target audience. That’s because if you actually ask them about their challenges, you’ll be able to figure out how you can help them.
When speaking to your target audience, you might also want to ask them about the issues they’re having with existing solutions. In doing so, you’ll know how to create something that people will prefer over the competition.
It’s important to note that you should survey your customers consistently. If you do this, you’ll be able to ensure your product is always doing a good job in regards to meeting customer needs.
2. Hire Good People
Aside from having a good product, start up tech companies must also focus on hiring good people.
This might sound like obvious advice, but hiring staff is something many companies rush into. This often leads to them hiring the wrong people, and this then results in a lot of disruption and wasted time.
Following this, you should practice a lot of caution when you finally get to the point where you need to hire someone.
If you want to make a ‘good’ hire, you should first consider what you’d like this new team member to do. If you put a lot of thought into this, you will be able to write a precise job description that clearly describes what you’re looking for.
This is helpful, as a clear job description will ensure the ‘right’ kinds of people apply for the role.
Once you have a batch of potential candidates, you might also want to put them through a rigorous interviewing process.
During this process, you might ask them to complete a few tasks associated with the role in question.
If you ask people to do this, you’ll get a good sense of how well they can perform. This is especially helpful when you consider that people might embellish some of the information they write down on their CV.
3. Master Marketing
Another way you can ensure success is by mastering the marketing side of your business. This is important because you might have a great product, but you may lose out if competitors are better at marketing.
The way you go about marketing your product will depend on the kind of product you’re looking to sell.
For instance, ‘PPC’ works well for some products, while ‘account-based marketing’ is better for others.
If you’re not sure where to begin, you may want to look at what your competitors are doing. You can then borrow their marketing strategy to get quick results that will bring money in the door.
Once things are going well, you can think about allocating 10% of your revenue towards new marketing strategies. If you experiment with new methods, you will eventually hit upon something that delivers great results.
That said, marketing is something that takes time, and some people don’t have the time to implement marketing strategies. If you’re in this camp, you should think about hiring some external marketing help.
Ideally, you should pick a certain marketing channel, and you should then hire someone that specializes in that channel.
For example, if you feel as though PPC marketing is going to be a good fit, you should hire someone that focuses on PPC marketing. Doing things this way is a good idea, as this specialist will often perform better than a generic marketer.
4. Optimize Everything
As time goes on, you must optimize everything so that your company runs more efficiently and effectively.
For instance, if you deal with a lot of customer support tickets, you might want to review the entire customer support process. In doing so, you may identify a few ways to reduce support enquires, and you may even improve the overall support experience.
You should also think about optimizing your website so you can generate more conversions.
So, you might think about changing the buttons or images on your site to see if you can generate more conversions. Such changes might only produce a 1% improvement in conversions, but over time, these improvements will add up.
If you’d like to learn more about how to improve conversion rate, this article from decibel.com is an excellent place to start.
Will You Follow These Tips for Start up Tech Companies?
The tips in this post can help start up tech companies survive past the five-year mark.
Of course, there are plenty of other things you need to worry about as the founder of a tech business. Following this, you should think about speaking to other founders so you can learn about these other issues.
If you speak to enough founders, you should learn about the many things that can go wrong in a tech start up. You can then use this knowledge to take preventative measures so your business doesn’t experience the same kinds of problems.
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