How to start and sell a startup? 🚀

This article is on summary of the book "Zero to Sold" by Arvid Kahl.

If you are an early startup or working on your super-cool idea? give this article a read. You will get some great insights into the startup world.

The book is all about How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business?

Let's start . . .

Idea: 💡

Everything begins and ends with an idea, to find the idea find your niche and then your audience. Validate the audience, the size of the market, the gap in the market, and how can you fix it? Stay more focused in this stage, it will make your startup journey easy.

Collect data: 📓

Talk to your future customers. I mean let them talk and understand their everyday concerns. Talking to the right people is also important. Collect the data points for validation.

Build: ⚒️

Once you validate the idea, it comes to building. Initially, you should build as little as possible by yourself. Focus on your core features. Use other Saas products to automate the process if affordable. (e.g. invoicing) If you are stuck on buying services, think about the difference between buying and building.

Some essentials for SaaS products (not necessarily from the beginning but required): ⚡

• Payment setup 💰
• Authentication 🔒
• Core features (Tested and Ready to serve) 📝
• Monitoring tool to get error logs 🐞
• Communication channel between you and the customer 🗨️

Pricing: 💰

Pricing communicates your product value. The pricing strategy plays an important factor in every SaaS business. Don't complex pricing structure. Make it simple so that customers do not have to spend time figuring out the cost-to-value ratio.

Build a business system: 🏢

In this stage, your product is built and customers started showing interest in your product.

You need to focus on building a business system with :

• Customer acquisition process
• A simple and repeatable subscription that generates repeatable revenue
• Adaptive to vendor failure
• Entrepreneurial Operating System

If you have a co-founder be aligned on: 🤝

• Contribution expectations
• Profitability expectations
• Share Distribution
• Vesting expectations
• Future of business (bootstrapping or VC)

Focus on customers: 🔍

You and your company are growing. Make an eternal connection with your customers, Prepare FAQs and design a knowledge base to let the customers help themselves. It will decrease your Customer support efforts.

Keeping a customer must be your main goal as it's less expensive than acquiring a new one. Build essential features that bring the most value and avoid focusing on lots of feature requests.

Let your customers find you new leads: 🚀

A referral system is a win-win. Tracking referrals is the most important thing for insight. Don't use this in the early start-up stage. The product should be stable and capable to handle bigger customers.

Stability Stage: 〰️

Your business is stable and at this stage customer support should scale :

• Stay connected with customers
• Do meetups and onboarding demos
• Ask for feedback and reviews

Final Growth Stage: 📈

You have to choose one option here: Sell your company or keep growing it.

If you choose to sell here are the reasons for buyers to acquire your business:

• Financial
• Strategical
• Acquihire
• Buy to shut down competition

Read more about : What Venture Capitalists Look For In a Start-up? 🚀

If you choose to keep growing:

You may need to hire more people to run operations. Find the right managers and leaders who can see your vision. Every leader you hire needs to care about customers and the business similarly.

That's all.

Enough of the spoilers. Now read the book and find out more.

I learned a lot from this book about startups and bootstrapping. The post I wrote was just a summary of the book.

If you really want to go deeper you should definitely read https://zerotosold.com/ by @arvidkahl