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How to thrust startup service business

Hello everyone I am having a Startup which is 1 and a half years ago, which is a service business where people can hire technicians around their area. As I am being a single person in the company I am unable to take it to the market. And I don’t have any member along with me right now but I don’t know where I am missing to scale and take the service to the market .

Excuse If any wrong in question, I am newbie to stackoverflow.

Thanks in advance

Answer 9759

If you really want a how-to, your first step is to realize that you might have put the cart before the horse. If you look into startups that fail, you’ll find a graveyard full of businesses whose founders built a product they thought the market needed without ever testing the waters, and realizing there was no market at all - or one that wasn’t willing to fork enough money to build a profitable business.

Fixing that involves getting in front of your end-users. Not surveys, not email blasts, not “I read idea in a blog post or a news article”… Get out of your building, meet your users, and start talking to them. There’s no shortage of business books and websites that will give you pointers on doing so. A good starting point would be you looking up “Lean startup” in Google and reading. Steve Blank’s website has a good amount of useful stuff too. The how-to can’t realistically be summarized in a short answer, but the gist of what you should do is:

  1. Pick a problem.
  2. Get in front of your users who have it.
  3. Understand what they really want and what’s most important to them.
  4. Test the waters by trying to sell your solution, in order to assess whether it’s something they’ll pay for or merely a nice-to-have.
  5. Build the solution if you find customers (or very strong signals that there will be some).
  6. Proceed with going to market based on your findings.

The second gotcha that you need to realize is that no two successful companies go to market in an identical way beyond following parts or all of the above non-actionable list. (Some don’t follow it and just get lucky, but don’t depend on that happening to you.)

As you work out what your users actually want and need, you’ll get insights on where your users hang out, what their specific concerns and problems are, how to successfully raise and address these concerns, what channels you could use to introduce them to your solution, and so forth.

You’ll then be able to move with something that will looks like: build a website, build a social media presence, grow a mailing list, do some PR and advertising, try a Kickstarter or three, yada yada yada with varying degrees of this or that based on your findings. But first, you need to figure out what to say, why say it, how to say it, where to say it, when to say it, and who to say it to. How you go to market entirely depends on those answers.

With all that said, and per the comment I posted to your question: the above is a full time job - more than one, in fact. For this reason and from experience, methinks you actually want a partner. Find someone who has a reasonably good idea of what they’re doing, else you’ll end up needing to learn how to do the above, working 12-16h days, and burning out a few years down the road - possibly taking your company down with you.


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