How to do it right from the start!

It has now been two days since we started the company. After so many hours spent thinking about this project it finally comes true! Armed with laptops, Jason, James and I spent these two days sharing ideas and opinions about our product and slowly but surely we are walking our way… However, one question seems to always come back to my mind: How to do it right from the start? The process of growing a digital products company is something I have never learnt at school. Worst, it is something none of us has never tried before! So how are we going to tackle our relative lack of experience?

First of all, by learning from others people’s experience. There are plenty of articles out there about creating a new business and we found some of them really useful (Check the YCombinator Library for useful information). We got inspired by articles such as “Ten Rules for a web startups”; “How to start a start up” and “Building your own start-up technology company”). But you know what? You can read thousands of articles and still feel lost the first days of the creation!

Creating a business is like writing a book, you know what you want to achieve but the amount of work you have to put in seems so massive that you don’t know where to start! Consequently, I had to have a deep thought around what to do first to make things right from the start:

1. Ask simple but essential questions: What are we? Who are we for? How are we different? What are we called? What are we like? What are we trying to achieve? All of these questions should be answered honestly and shared by people in your organization. It will help to create consistent goals to achieve (Check “Why Do Web Startups Die? Lack of Alphalpha” to read more about the importance of these questions).
2. Once you have identified your objective and you get a better idea of the big picture, it’s important to adopt a step-by-step attitude. Remember that even the small steps and little victories along your path will lead to great success.
3. Focus, focus and focus! Once you have a rough idea of what you need to do, just do it. Being honest, it’s easy to say but hard to apply. In fact, it’s all about finding the good balance between sharing, communicating and getting things done. Only experience will help us finding the right alchemy 🙂
4. Finally don’t forget one thing: there is no better organization and management structure than your enterprise’s own business. In other words, don’t be afraid to experience your own way to do things because that is the way to learn! But make sure to learn from your mistakes, fast 😉

Stay tuned for more experience sharing!