Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2011. Its remarks about entrepreneurs’ lack of funding and investors’ caution “right now” reflect the 2011 economic crisis in Spain.
While watching an interview with Salvador Figueros, author of Twitt emprendedor, I was struck by the way he simplified the keys to business success, or rather, what we need to build a profitable business.
Salvador is right: to succeed in business, all we need are these three things:
- A market: We need a market with a specific need.
- A product: We’ll need a product or service that meets the need this market has.
- The ability to bring the product to market: We need to be able to get our product to this market, because if we have a good product and there’s a market for it, but we can’t make it known, we have nothing.
These are indeed the keys to succeeding in business, although each of these points could fill a hundred explanations: the market focus (the market as a whole or a specific niche), the type of product (an innovative, original product or an existing one), and so on. Each of these “branches,” as in chess, would call for a different strategy.
However, one of the biggest problems entrepreneurs face today is lack of funding. Then again, as we’ve said several times, funding does exist, and there are companies willing to finance a project. The thing is that any investor, whether an institution or an individual, knows how risky things are right now and wants to be very clear from the outset about how much they’ll earn on their investment and how long it will take to see a return, so they won’t fund just any project.
What kind of product, and how to get it to market
These days it’s hard to be original, because, as the saying goes, everything has already been invented. However, using the new definition of innovation (copying something that exists and improving it), we can always add value for the customer with an existing product or service: by improving the product, cutting its cost or offering some other kind of value. In several articles we’ve explained how to set out on the entrepreneur’s path, from how to find that business idea to how to finance it, and we even explained how to start a business with no money at first. We summed all of this up in two articles, as a step-by-step guide.
Once we’re running the business, our attention turns to finding our first customers, increasing profitability, and so on.
As Pilar Kaltzada explained, the type and concept of a company has changed, and as entrepreneurs we need to adapt. We should use both the old method and the new one (the internet), and with the latter in particular, we need to dive in fully.
There are many ways to win customers and make our product known, from the most direct, such as dropping flyers in mailboxes, to the most elaborate, an online strategy. We covered all these points in this article:
Further reading
- Donald Trump: the mindset of an entrepreneur
- A true story: the man who had to start a business to save his children’s lives
- Steve Jobs’s early days
- Life is risk: if you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived
Featured image: Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
