3 Characteristics of a Successful Startup
In a previous article, we talked about why great ideas may not be so great after all. When it comes to starting a successful business, coming up with a great idea and successfully executing it can be a difficult task. After all, most startup companies fail during the first year.
There are a lot of different factors that go into building a successful business, but there are three things you can do to help maximise your success. In this post, we’re going to show you the three characteristics of every successful startup business.
Solving a Problem
I think it goes without saying that everyone in life has problems. Whether in their personal lives or business, problems are unavoidable. We all hate them, and most of us will pay good money to make them go away.
Wait a moment, did you hear what I just said? People will pay good money to make their problems go away! If you can create a product or service that tackles a problem people have, they will happily pay you to make their problems go away.
To illustrate this point, I’m going to tell you about a service called Opskins. If you’re a gamer, you’ve more than likely heard of the online game distribution service called Steam. One of the features steam provides users is the ability to sell valuable in-game items and content to other users. The only problem with this is that any profits you make can only be used on Steam to buy more video games or in-game content.
Many people would therefore try to sell outside of Steam to people via PayPal. Unfortunately, many people also became victims of scams and people using PayPal’s chargeback feature to buy items from them, then request their money back from PayPal saying they didn’t receive the items. This was a major problem and made it difficult for people to safely sell their items for cash.
In order to combat this and help steam users safely sell their items without having to worry about being scammed by other users outside of Steam, a 21-year-old guy living with his parents created a service called Opskins. The service is an escrow marketplace that allows gamers to sell and buy virtual items using PayPal directly through them. They have a very thorough and rigorous system in place requiring buyers to verify their identities with them before they can make purchases. If buyers try to make a chargeback with them, their accounts are automatically banned, and they are no longer allowed to use the service.
About 6 months ago, Opskins was reported to be making around $12k per day in sales of these virtual goods. It’s safe to say that they are making quite the killing in the gaming community now, simply because they solved a problem that many gamers had.
Make Life Easier
If you own a website and have any social media presence, you probably know by now how difficult it is to constantly update and post new content every day. Smart bloggers will typically spend a day or two just writing tons of content all at once in order to manage their time wisely and not be worried about having to write every day.
This is great and all, but for some, it can be quite inconvenient or downright impossible to post or publish their content on social media at a set time every day. Unfortunately, life doesn’t run on our own schedules, so rushing every day to make sure your social media post goes live can be a real headache.
In order to help remedy this problem and make life easier for social media marketers and internet bloggers, some really smart people came out with a very popular service called Buffer. So what is Buffer and what does it do? Buffer is a social media tool that makes it easy for anyone to schedule posts on social media websites. It allows you to basically put all the posts you want to publish in a queue, then set them to go live and auto-post whenever you want them to. It’s now one of the most popular social media tools out there.
So what made Buffer successful? It’s because it has one of the three characteristics of a successful startup. It makes life MUCH easier for social media marketers and bloggers. They no longer have to try to be near a computer at a set time a day. They can essentially just set it and forget it.
If your product or service can make people’s lives easier, then you’ve got a winner.
Automate the Tedious
If you own a website and manage it yourself, you know how tedious it can be to make backups every day, or even multiple times a day. It’s actually a pretty easy task to do if you know what you’re doing. Nothing very hard about it at all. Unfortunately, though, it gets very tedious after a while.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just automatically set things up with one command or just with one click of the mouse? Better yet, wouldn’t it be great if you could just set things up once and your website automatically makes backups of your websites, and emails you the backup, or a link to it?
Well, I’m going to answer that question for you. The answer is YES. It would be great. However what if you’re not a programmer or don’t know how to do this for your own WordPress website? You’d probably download a nifty program like BackupWordPress to do it for you. Now, this plugin didn’t just come out of thin air. Someone had to develop it. That someone has created a successful product that has over 200,000 installs today.
They were able to achieve this by utilising all three characteristics of a successful startup. Their plugin BackupWordPress solves a problem, it makes life easier by not having to manually backup files yourself, and it automates the process for you.
So what are you waiting on? You can do this too! Use this knowledge to start your successful service or product today!
