Having a brilliant product or service isn’t enough. To capture today’s consumers, smart startups are first crafting a brand strategy—one that builds a forward-looking foundation for the company.
Suppose you’ve got an idea for a great new thingamajig. It could be anything—a luxury candle, affordable college education, or a product to prevent male-pattern baldness. You can’t get the concept out of your head. You have to bring it to life.
But you have no prototypes, and no experience with the intricacies of industrial design. No understanding of production and distribution. No web design experience. No detailed market projections. No money.
In this moment, logic would advise against obsessing over brand strategy—and it would definitely advise against hiring a pricey agency to help you do it. And yet, a growing number of startups are doing just that, seeing great success as a result.
Only a few years ago, product was king. Founders focused on getting a minimum viable product to market, fast—iteration could fix shortcomings. Brand strategy was a back-burner issue, one to address when time and budget allowed.
But today’s tech tools make it easier for founders to, well, produce a product. With design sprints, rapid wireframe and product prototyping, contract manufacturing, fulfillment-as-a-service, webstore design, and hosting services, some entrepreneurs can go from concept to first paying customer in a matter of weeks.
That’s a double-edged sword. Those tools that make it easy to rush a product to market? They’re available to everyone, and have resulted in unprecedented competition in the startup world. (According to Crunchbase, VCs closed more than 21,800 global funding rounds last year, continuing a multiyear trend of increasing deal flow and sizes.) Countless entrepreneurs are discovering that their supposedly game-changing idea has already been launched by others, or at best is being copied by nimble competitors.
Bu hikaye Entrepreneur dergisinin Startups Spring 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye Entrepreneur dergisinin Startups Spring 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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How Small Shops Take Big Risks - It's not easy for mom-and-pops to try something new, because they rarely have a safety net to fail.But there are ways to innovate cautiously-as one small business on our list, All My Heart tattoo studio, has found.
The Charlotte, North Carolina, studio is airy and suffused with natural light. In the reception area, there are modular chairs, midcentury couches, and a vase of fresh flowers on a Japanese-influenced cabinet. But the real surprise goes beyond aesthetics. All My Heart's owner, Graham Beech, isn't just playing with a new look; he's trying out a whole new business model. Historically, tattoo shops have wanted to control the clientele, and use the tattoo artist as kind of a cog in the wheel, Beech says. What's different about our business is that the client is the artist, and they have their own individual clients.
5 Ways to Multitask Your Fall - From a corporate office to working from the living room, Emmy Award winner Mario Armstrong has five new products designed to make putting in the hours more enjoyable.
From a corporate office to working from the living room, Emmy Award winner Mario Armstrong has five new products designed to make putting in the hours more enjoyable.
You Can Hire Like Netflix - The streaming platform built an incredible team with a strategy called
Looking for a job? ClassDojo has 15 positions open, but heads up: The bar is death zone high, and they're in no rush to hire. The children's education company has a team of 220 and a hiring rate of 0.09% of those who apply.How can a company grow while hiring that slowly? The answer is "talent density", a concept that's gaining steam lately.
Speedy Growth Killed My Startup - We seemed to be rocking it-lots of press, major partnerships. Then we learned the harsh consequences of overlooking our customers.
Three months after I launched my company, we were featured in The New York Times. Other national outlets followed. The attention led to partnerships with Shake Shack, Bombas, Urban Outfitters, and hundreds of other major brands.You might think this sounds good. I sure did when it happened. Hockey stick growth is a sign of success, right? But it wasn't. My company, This App Saves Lives, had fallen into one of the most surprising and ultimately fatal traps for entrepreneurs: We grew before truly understanding our product-market fit. That mistake would ultimately result in the demise of our business.
How to Hire for the Future - Small businesses are struggling to find quality labor. So flip the conversation: Show workers how your business will set them up for opportunity.
Small businesses have a hiring problem. According to the July monthly jobs report from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), 19% of small businesses rank the inability to find quality labor as the single most important issue facing their company, while 38% reported job openings they could not fill. Overall, 49% reported few or no qualified applicants for the positions they were trying to fill.
Three Pivots to $100 Million - How do you find a working business model? Do it like Rowan-a brand that reinvented itself many times before finally piercing the ear-piercing market
If you have a tween girl, you've probably heard of Rowan. It's the cool brand for piercings, where licensed nurses insert hypoallergenic studs into thousands of ears every day. With more than 500 employees, it's on track to have 65 stores and an annual run rate of $100 million in revenue this year.But in 2017, Rowan was just a fledgling startup with a great idea and a bad business model. It survived because founder Louisa Schneider was willing to pivot, and pivot, and pivot again, until its mission, profit, and market all clicked into place.
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THE CURSE OF GROWING TOO FAST
FAIRE is a platform for small businesses, but it grew big the wrong way-almost becoming a $12 billion wreck. Here's how it fixed the problem, and why you should think twice before skyrocketing.
HOW TO ASK FAMILY FOR MONEY
Your friends-and-family fundraising round doesn't have to be scary and awkward. Here's advice from one of the world's leading investors.
