Your Startup Is Just a Small Fish in a Big Pond

Startups all over the world crave one thing: attention. They don’t want money and they don’t want employees, they want fame. Fame is the ultimate decider in business. A famous business with a well-known brand is going to sell their products much faster than an unknown brand even if they have a superior product. It’s for this reason that startups strive not to make a profit, but to gain attention. They can typically do this in a number of different ways. For instance, they can opt to use social media, create a fancy website, interact with their customers or even try to go viral with a ridiculous promotional idea.

The best way to grow into a larger fish and eventually rule the pond is to stay relevant. How you can do this depends on your product, but here are a couple of tips to help you grow your business before the big fishes get to you and swallow you up.

Have a good front page

When designing a website, we typically want to draw attention to the entire site as a whole instead of specific bits of information. As a result, we need to make our landing page as flashy and eye-catching as possible. This will most likely require the help of web designers, but there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing the work because it’s a highly specialised task.

First, ensure that your website works well on both mobile and desktop platforms. Many people use their phones to access the internet nowadays, making it essential for you to target both mobile users and computer users. This can typically be done by your designer, but if you’re using a web host, then consult their customer support for more information.

Follow the three-click rule for information. If it takes more than three clicks for your viewers to reach their desired information, then your menus are too confusing or convoluted and need to be simplified. It shouldn’t take more than a single click for your visitors to reach your contact information, and products or important web pages shouldn’t be buried under a maze of links.

You also want to think about optimisation for your website. This means that you need to compress images so they aren’t too big in file size. As mentioned before, many web users access the internet with their phones, which means that unless they’re using WiFi, they have a very limited amount of data. As long as you cut down on large images and video files, you should be fine and your website will have a very low file size, making it responsive and fast to load no matter what browser you are using.

Specialise in a product

No one’s going to notice you if you diversify too early during your business’s life. Focus on selling a single product and get well-known for it. For instance, if you’re manufacturing a budget smartphone, then don’t make five different models with different colours. Start with a neutral-coloured model, market it, sell it, gauge interest and success, then you can start producing other colours, other models, or upgraded versions. Never get ahead of yourself.

If you have just a single product to sell, then it means you have an easy way to allocate your resources. When you have multiple products that are all very different, you tend to thin out your resources in order to market them all. For instance, you might have to pay designers for advertising banners for each of your products, or your call centre staff might be confused at the number calls you’re getting and the knowledge they need in order to deal with problems from every product. The more simple you keep it, the fewer growth problems you’ll encounter.

Specialising in a product also helps you gain a good reputation. Once you become “that” brand to go for if you want to buy a specific product, you’ll gain a ridiculous amount of fame and you’ll be surprised at how many people will come to buy your product due to your brand alone. As mentioned at the start, fame is incredibly important to a new startup and one of the best ways to achieve it is to specialise in a product and turn heads early on.

Planning for growth

No matter what state your business is currently in, you’ve probably thought about growing it. Growing a business isn’t a simple task and it’s important that you don’t’ take it lightly. First, think about your current employees and compare it to the state of your business. As an amateur, chances are your employees aren’t very specialised and they can perform a number of roles. This leads to them being blank slates, meaning they can be trained depending on their current skills to fit a future role.

The other option is to simply hire an employee. For instance, if you need a technical engineer to manage your server and computers, then it’s a good idea to hire one as soon as you grow large enough to have an office server linked with several dozen computers. However, at the beginning, it might be cheaper to train an employee in how to maintain basic server setups, and you can even consider putting them on a learning course to specialise their skills for a future role.

To grow a business, you also need space. It could be space on your premises, it could be space in your storage warehouse or space in the office to fit new employees. How you use this space is entirely up to you, but you need to remember that in order to grow a business, you’re most likely going to need more space and this comes with a lot of different complications.

Summary

Being a small fish in a big pond isn’t such a big deal until those big fish come hunting for you. It’s in your best interests to avoid their gaze and try to keep yourself distanced from larger corporations who are either out to imitate you or buy you. Make sure you show off your website, plan ahead for when you’re a larger company, and ensure that you specialise in products to build up an early reputation.