How To Avoid Dying Away as an Emerging Startup

This article is written by Brian Malika, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Andrea Barrica is CEO/co-founder of O.school, an online shame-free platform for pleasure education, powered by live-streaming and chat to help people unlearn shame, process trauma, and learn about sex and pleasure. Previously, Andrea co-founded YC-backed accounting and tax platform, inDinero.com, where she led sales and operations. She also served as a venture partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at 500 Startups, one of the world’s most active, global seed funds.

Immediately you get venture capital or some sort of an investment fund, I would encourage you to celebrate for a day and then after that go back to the drawing board on how the fund will be utilized to meet your entrepreneurial goals. Keep in mind that having an innovative idea on paper that wins an investment fund is completely different from implementing the same on the ground. Hence it is on that note that I have prepared the following six expert pieces of advice that you can use to check before you start implementing that innovative idea through the investment fund awarded.

6 Boxes To  Check Before Spending That Cheque

These six pieces of advice should not miss in the initial stages for structuring plans on how to spend the investment fund you have been awarded to implement your innovative idea.

(1. ) First, come up with a market penetration technique that only targets your real paying customers :

Do not roll out your products and services to a market which does not reciprocate your value as this will save you the time and money. Plus you will get the chance to receive genuine feedback from paying customers who are the real reason your business exists in the first place.

(2.) Culture and discipline :

Make sure that at the beginning of the roll-out for your innovate idea on the ground, you identify cultures of excellence through strict time keeping, having rules of engagement, agreeing on desired values among others. There should be maximum discipline in observing the cultures set.  This will ensure that good behaviors and control is nurtured within the team that implements the innovative idea .

(3.) Manageable team :

Have a team that can easily be manageable under one leader. If you start with a large team it gets harder to communicate, identify special talents and increases the chances on internal wrangles which all lead to poor team perforce thereby reducing the success of your innovative idea hitting the market.

(4.) Account for every cent :

Again, do n’t even think that just because you have thousands of dollars as part of the investment fund then you are safe from economic woes. The truth is that, without proper accounting, you risk losing track of funds or detecting which expenditures shouldn’t be there in the first place and as such there is massive loss of money that would have been prevented.

(5.)  Keep a close relationship with your investors :

After receiving the investment award, most start-up founders concentrate so much on the groundwork that they forget to continuously brief the investors on how the market penetration or scalability plan is faring on.

Remember that the investor that before any investor decided to put money in your start-up, they first saw some potential in your idea.

Therefore , if you keep briefing investors on how your innovative idea is faring on through the developing of a better relationship , then it becomes easier for your particular investor to notice any changes or deviation of the original potential that they saw in your innovative idea in the first place  hence giving you the opportunity to make adjustments where possible.

(6.) Focus :

Lastly, focus on the goal of ensuring that your innovative idea does improve the experiences and needs for your target customers.  Forget about other business engagements that may come in within like public glamour, friends and such. Nothing should distract your attention from the main goal of serving your customers in a better way every day.

Being able to secure an investment partnership is just part of a long process towards being a successful start-up. And that true success lies in the ability to keep on analyzing your flaws and improving where possible.  I hope that next time you sign that cheque from an investor you will find this advice in this article to be useful.