Hello there!
Let's say you've decided to start a business. There are certainly some reasons pushing you toward that decision. Lately, I've been seeing thoughts on social media about escaping the 9-5 cycle and seeking freedom. I even see opinions suggesting that getting investment from VCs or Angel investors would be bad, a waste of time, or that even if you get investment, you'll just become their employee. While I agree with some points, I think we need to consider a middle ground. There are many startups that might be impossible to build without VC funding, and there are many business ideas that would inevitably fail if attempted with VC backing in certain countries.
First, let's review the startup process, though not necessarily in strict order.
Legal Obligations: First of all, you absolutely need to get rid of fancy thoughts. What you're trying to build is definitely not something purely about fun. You're going to establish a company that will start incurring expenses from day one, and you'll become a taxpayer who must comply with the laws of whatever country you're in. From now on, no one will prepare your payroll, and you won't be able to plan around a regular monthly income.
Ideation Phase: Yes, finally you have an idea. You believe in your idea. You think everyone will get excited when they hear it. And you believe that your idea is the most important feature of your startup engine. It's very normal to feel this way, and it's even necessary. However, when you start voicing your idea out loud, there's a chance – and I'm sorry to say, quite a high chance – that the reception won't be the same. You need to be resilient enough to face these negative voices. When I started my first startup attempt, I would get into arguments, though not too heated, with those who expressed negative opinions. I tried to defend my idea and prove them wrong. But the right approach is to gather as many opinions as possible and develop a strategy for how to sell the idea later. As someone who has been trying to build things in the startup world for quite a while, I can confidently tell you this: execution is everything. While the idea certainly has an impact once you establish and start running the company, what really comes to the forefront is how you present it, how you turn it into a product, and how you try to sell it. You need to wake up every morning with the same motivation and do the same repetitive tasks. And even if you have a bad idea, this system can work and help you reach a turnover and profit that will keep your company alive, if not turn it into a unicorn startup.
Development Phase: You've sat down to turn your idea into a product. My most important advice at this point is that you absolutely need to be as fast as possible. With AI entering our lives, this has actually reached the level we want, but it's not enough – if the product isn't in the desired format, you should be able to pivot quickly and modify your product. Let me tell you about our "Secure Coding for Developers" product that we first launched in 2016. It took about 6 months until the initial launch, and we were sure it would sell like hotcakes when we announced it. But after the launch, when we couldn't generate many sales meetings for 3 months, and when we kept hearing from our corporate customers in meetings that they wanted features from the traditional format of the product, we had to quickly convert our IDE extension product into a Desktop App – I'm describing this as if it were a bad thing, but we made our first sale just one month after the pivot phase. From this, you can conclude: try to talk to your potential customers even during the development process and really listen to what they say! Also, if you're launching a product in the B2B space like us, be sure to consider the different perspectives between decision-makers and end-users. There's a high chance they won't share the same thoughts!
In essence, develop quickly and pivot continuously if necessary.
Marketing: Yes, you've reached the stage of announcing your product. Many people say marketing should start much earlier. Websites in waitlist format, early SEO efforts, community building, and so on. I completely agree with these. Doing this will also drive you to launch the product quickly. I can't say marketing is a topic I know very well, but in the simplest terms, I can tell you this: my understanding of marketing is splashing water around (I read this somewhere too). How you splash the water isn't extremely important. What matters is how much attention you can attract.
Again, for the B2B/Enterprise sector, I can say this: as the price of the product you're trying to sell increases, your contact with the customer will increase. In other words, you can probably only sell a $100k product by convincing the director of the relevant department. However, you'll try to sell a $100 product through channels like SEO, social media marketing, paid ads, and you'll want as little customer contact as possible. We'll feature writings from marketing experts on this topic in the future. Stay tuned ;)
Support: We've reached the area that's often not thought about much at first but becomes unavoidable after product sales. Everything won't be perfect. The product will crash, sometimes you'll experience outages due to third-party providers, or code written during a sleepy moment will come back to haunt you later. I'm telling you what you need to do about this issue right from the start: Absolutely classify support findings and problems. It can be in Excel at first, you can write it in a document, enter it in Trello, JIRA, or Zendesk. What's important is that you definitely record it somewhere and, if possible, provide feedback to the customer about the process.
Yes, these are my honest and sincere thoughts... Both my team and I are burning with desire to write more. See you in future articles to avoid making this one too long, and I wish you all a happy new year, as this is my first article of 2025 :)
Stay healthy.
Caner Özden