Stage 1 in a company's development is a process of turning your business idea into a real executable business plan. At this early stage you, as a founder, should focus on market research and gathering data that will allow you to steer your enterprise into a market niche with the lowest hanging fruit, where resistance to market entry are lowest and sales can be achieved most easily. You need to set a course for targeting a narrowly defined customer profile that shares a common point of pain that your company can address. You then need to convince potential customers to take the extra risk of dealing with a startup company.
Because of the generally low burn rate at this stage, you want to take your time and learn as much as possible about your market, your potential customers, your entry strategy and YOURSELF. Rather than reinventing the wheel you will want to learn from others who have done it before, as YOU will quickly need to master, among other things, the four major business disciplines of Sales, Marketing, Operations and Finance. In reality you will need more expertise than you can acquire quickly. Using a virtual team is a partial solution. But having a well thought out business design process will really lower your risk of failure and reduce the time and capital you need to get to a cash flow positive situation. You should explore many different business models, knowing that starting one business model to finance getting to another, can at times preserve your ownership by reducing capital needs.
In this critical stage of development where you are building the foundation for the future of your business, we have designed a complete module to help you successfully get to the next stage of your company's development.
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