ONCE A STARTUP, ALWAYS A STARTUP?

It’s great to have an entrepreneurial spirit.

It’s even greater to be an entrepreneur with a startup because you’re devoting your energies and time to sow your idea. But beyond all the excitement and the busyness of the brain-storming sessions, the collaborations and the sharing of ideas; beyond the search for suitable partners or the paperwork or the rental of office space or work space or the preparation of presentations lies the crux of all your activities.

Seeds of Rubber

The seed- and every seed that is sown waits out a future to be what it is created to be.

 

But that future doesn’t come automatically. Neither does it come easy. Plenty of day-by-day grind goes into the nurturing of that seed before a sapling even appears. Along the way, perhaps someone will encourage you not to “be so negative and skeptical when something is not properly tried in the first place.”

 

Or someone else might say to you,

“How to reach strategy or product vision without making money? How to survive long enough to attract investors without money?”

 

We do agree. Because as your seed grows, real-world issues do crop up, and very often, these will be threatening ones multiplying at horrifying speeds and which can cripple your survival in a stroke or two. It can come in the form of an inadequate consumer market. It can mean that a fantastic product or service successfully implemented elsewhere faces a problem of localization or it can be that somehow, your consumers don’t seem to need your product as much as you think they do.

 

But the availability of finances alone will not solve the issues you will then face at hand, and right now you can dedicate your resources with the goal toward immediate cash flow, you can worry about all the urgent tasks a startup will definitely encounter, you can start with as positive a mindset as you can be about finances and business plans and implementation processes- but without careful sustainability planning at the onset- not at the bottom of the to-do list- likely your startup will end up in a situation that “didn’t make it,” because the “market (was) not big enough,” and so the business “lost the energy” and all because consumers “are too stingy to even pay a little.”

 

A situation that no genuine, dream-believing entrepreneur will want, because no matter how well-managed your finances are or how passionate you are about your startup, it really isn’t only about a plot of land, however small- and your flexibility to curtail and adjust your goals for it. It is really about keeping that plot of land and expanding that plot to become a plantation- and another- and another- and when that goal becomes essential, you will need more than a haphazardly-rushed, short-term business plan. You will need accurate budgeting during the planning, accurate cash flow projections and the ability to attract investors.


In short, you will need an integrated, detailed and pragmatic market strategy.