Many students in management and other advanced courses struggle with details on how to start their entrepreneurial journey. Questions around cost, process, steps, office, digital / software items needed, etc. keep them confused and away from taking the first step. In that series, I had posted a blog / article in the past: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-build-lean-startup-tier-2-3-cities-india-part-1-neil-harwani/
Further to above, find below a detailed list for what is needed for a mid sized company / startup of 20 to 100 employees to start working:
- Professional email & website
- Target market, target customer, target offerings, target geography, target method of sales details among other things
- Details of idea & product / services, pitch and marketing information decks
- Udyog Aadhaar registration
- PAN, TAN & GST registration depending on your business size
- Lawyer and CA for company formation, tax filing and yearly audit certification
- Startup registration with Government of India
- Bank account to disburse salary and maintain operations
- EPF registration in specific cases
- Medical, life & travel insurance subscription depending on need and compliance
- Online storage from Google, Microsoft OR Apple
- Software for accounting, managing docs, intranet, etc.
- Membership of meetups, incubators, etc. that help startups
- LinkedIn premium, good smartphone, Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn pages
- Desktops & laptops which could be on Ubuntu Linux or Windows or Mac
- Co-Founders and focus / advisory groups, mentors
- Trademark filing and intellectual property rights management
- Funding clarity: boot strapped or funded or mixed
- List of angel investors, incubators, venture capitalists, government agencies, banks, crowd funding platforms who could fund the business
- Operating space: Digital or physical or mixed location business
- Network of related entrepreneurs & customers who could potentially support your journey
- Sample contracts for employees, contractors, consultants, customers, vendors, suppliers, sales, etc.
- Templates for internal documents
- Leave management, employee management portal & cyber security software
- Target quality and other certifications like ISO / CMMI, etc.
- Admin, HR & Finance staff
Hope this helps the students community in understanding what to expect in terms of starting the journey of business.
Email me: neil@TechAndTrain.com
- As a starting point, I never wanted my startup to scale with the philosophy of people increasing linearly with revenue. What I wanted to build right from beginning was a startup focused on one of my passions which is education with right philosophy and associated people who have similar goals
- My idea was clear: Focus on education & academics at Gujarat level and provide services & products around it. Maybe we will scale beyond Gujarat, maybe not – we can decide at the appropriate time in future
- Build a small consulting type firm with under 5-6 contractors / employees / partners / consultants rather than outsourcing type large firm
- Keep the company organization, offerings, relations, taxation and other things simple
- Allow all to work digitally from wherever they are, they only move to customer locations to fulfill their work for them, rest of the time they are at home. On top of this there is no restriction for a person associated with my startup around what they can do in off time with other customers that they build on their own
- Focus on relationships and good deliverable to customers over billing rates and revenue
- Narrow down focus on what you can and cannot do. Learn to say no when things are beyond you
- Bootstrap through and through on own money for all parts: digital, physical, taxation, legal, etc. Avoid investor money till as long as possible to continue on the initial direction that the startup has
- Have a professional website, blog, email, number, references and other details to build a good digital presence
- Build a community of supporters and network around your startup built via genuine help & mentor-ship to them. If you are not authentic, don’t expect others to support you. Provide good services at high quality and you are very likely to have a good network
- Be generous in sharing revenue and credit with people who are associated with you. Put them on your website, promote them, endorse and recommend them, share revenue no matter how small or big – you can’t win alone.
- Raise the bar of your ecosystem and network rather than only yourself
- Don’t give up on people who helped you in your journey
- Find clear revenue sources for yourself outside of your startup domain as well to sustain the venture for long term
- Have good reading habits, devote time to reading daily around your industry and domain
- As of now we have 4+ universities & colleges around Gujarat as our customers
- It’s not easy doing multiple things around startup, consulting and balancing work / life / family / network. Be ready to sacrifice lot of time, effort, money and other things on the way to achieving what you want. If you are not ready for all this, it will be difficult to scale or sustain. Be ready for at-least 12 to 24+ months of real hard work to make your brand known in your market
- You will have bad days and you will have good days. Learn to live with them, both will come and go. Keep the count of good days larger than bad days
- Reach out to me at neil@TechAndTrain.com if you want to discuss Data Science / R / Java / Python / etc. or want to conduct a training for MBA / BE / MCA / MSc students or are interested in having a workshop for on Data Science / R / Java / AWS / Excel / etc.
Ideas on Innovation around Software. We Thrive On Ideas. We are Learner Centered, Open Source & Digital Focused.