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Different Stages of Startup

Different stages of start-up’s

 A start up is an entrepreneurial endeavour that aims to successfully monetize a good or service, either with their own funds or with the assistance of a third party. The most valuable corporations in the world were once start-ups, notwithstanding the high failure rate. Although the failure rate is high, success may be measured in any of the following seven stages since a Start-up can only exist and make sense if it alleviates at least one pain point in the industry in which it works.

Stage – 1 Ideation 

The value of life is in ideas. The calibre of your products and, arguably, your life will be greatly impacted by your ability to produce high-caliber ideas.In the first stages of a startup, the business itself is really just an idea. If you don’t take more action at this stage, your idea will merely sit there and never fully develop as you wait for someone else to think of it. You should check to see if your problem solution fits at this point.Having a clear understanding of the problem you’re trying to address and a clear vision of how your business or product will solve that problem is one of the hardest obstacles to get past during the ideation stage. Write down everything that comes to mind when coming up with startup ideas, no matter how ridiculous or unoriginal it may seem. If you typically struggle with coming up with ideas, you might be surprised by how many you generate when you let yourself loose.

Stage - 2 Customer Discovery

 Before a full product is built, a recursive process called customer discovery is used to better understand the needs of the consumer. This approach is used by startups as well as large and/or established businesses to develop new products, focus on new clients, enter new markets, and modernise or expand existing operations. During the customer discovery process, you can identify potential customers, learn about their problems and pain areas, create buyer personas, and then match your solution with their needs. In order to solve a specific problem for customers, not the general public, customer discovery assures that the product or service you offer will be effective.

Stage – 3 Idea Validation 

The practice of evaluating company ideas to determine their viability is known as idea validation. It aids in demonstrating the market’s need and the target market’s readiness to pay. Founders who would rather skip steps and don’t determine whether their potential clients are interested in buying a product fail too soon. Without a relationship with actual people, your startup becomes a money pit with no chance of both good sales and marketing.

Stage – 4 Minimum viable product 

A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product that has the functionality necessary to draw in early adopters and verify a product idea at an early stage of the product development cycle. The MVP can assist the product team in obtaining customer input as rapidly as possible in sectors like software so that they can iterate and enhance the product. The MVP Is essential to agile development since it is founded on the idea that products should be validated and improved through user feedback. A fundamental tenet of the MVP concept is that you create a real product—which may be no more than a landing page or a service that appears automated but is entirely manual behind the scenes—that you can provide to clients and watch how they actually use it. More reliable than asking people what they would do is seeing what individuals actually do with regard to a product.

Stage – 5 Product Market Fit

 The idea of “product-market fit” is well-liked among startups. It reveals whether a product was successful in resolving customer issues. A brand begins to expand after its product and market fit is achieved. When you reach the product-market fit stage of the product lifecycle, you are aware that your idea will succeed. Before the stakeholders spend in promotion, every business needs to be sure that its product will suit the needs of buyers. Otherwise, they run the danger of wasting their money. Every company searches for an audience group that will be the first to try a new product before releasing it. To assess how well this or that solution helps to alleviate their problems, these persons should share the same pain spots. When a product successfully navigates its obstacles, a brand has achieved product-market fit and the product is prepared to take on the world. Consequently, a product-market fit speeds promotion and increases word-of-mouth.

Stage – 6 Growth Establishment and scale up

 A corporation entering this stage is most concerned with two things: first, consolidating and managing the financial gains brought on by quick expansion, and second, maintaining the benefits of small size, such as responsiveness and entrepreneurial spirit. 

The company must rapidly increase the size of its management team in order to eliminate the inefficiencies that growth can bring about and to professionalise the business through the use of tools like budgets, strategic planning, management by objectives, and standard cost systems—while maintaining its entrepreneurial spirit.

 

Stage – 7 Maturity and Possible Exits 

Because of the methods you developed during the six earlier stages, by the time a firm reaches the maturity stage, the idea that was only a thought has taken control and is making stable profits. To get over the difficulties and maintain the company’s successful track record, this stage depends on a financial source. Although the last stage of a company’s growth is maturity, which is not where you want your company to remain. Companies that linger in the maturity period may still be expanding, but slowly. If this is the case, you might need to start over and figure out how to get your company back into the expansion stage, or come up with an exit strategy. 

Entrepreneurs whose businesses are in the maturity stage are concentrated on the following: 

• How long the company can continue to operate with a negative cash flow. 

• Growing the company 

• Identifying and implementing an exit strategy, if necessary.

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