How To Revive Your Startup After It Crumbles Down
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.
It is estimated that 70-75 percent of startups die after their fifth birthday. This is a very scary statistical finding keeping in mind that many startup founders invest have immensely invested their time and emotions with an aim to see their innovative idea transform the world.
So, the biggest question that rings in the mind right now is if there is hope after a start-up starts sinking after a massive investment. And the answer is that yes there is hope only if the affected start-up founders decide to go back to the drawing board and access the areas that they messed around.
Five Points On How To Resuscitate Your Dying Startup
1. Fire Everyone That Does Not Add Value
Immediately you notice that your start-up is showing signs of sinking, then that is a strong signal that the hands working on that start-up are not doing enough if not harmful to the start-up. And as such, it is important to do an assessment that would ensure all the unnecessary staff is trimmed down immediately to save costs, internal conflicts and also ease the flow of communication on innovative approaches which happens well in a small team.
2. Go Back To The Basics
If your start-up was promising in the first place but right now things ain’t doing well at the moment, the is only means one thing. And that is to say that you missed the way at some point. Hence in order to ensure that your back on track it is advised that one goes back to the drawing board to assess where did the rain start beating them, what did they stop doing right and how can they spark their potential again.
3. Empathy Helps
The reason why your start-up is crumbling down could be that you lost touch with bettering experiences for your target customers. And as a result, they stopped paying for your products and services. Maybe the business environment has changed due to new technological innovations or whatever the case just make sure you design a strategy that relates your business to address the real issues and challenges derailing the betterment of services and goods offered to your target customers.
4. Beware of Metrics That Don’t Matter
When launching your start-up, chances are that you might be concentrating on numbers that don’t matter and they include popularity on the internet and extensive media coverage for your start-up. Therefore, it's important to focus on metrics that matter which include: revenue generated, the rate of growth, market reach and so on.
5. Discover the pain then scale later
Go back on board and discover what exactly is the customer problem that you are working on. Chances are that your start-up is focussing on a wrong customer problem thus the reason why you are failing. Do not concentrate so much on scaling your start-up to a wider market reach when in fact your working on the wrong problem simply because you will be fighting a losing battle.
Conclusion
Yes, it is possible to win a million dollars as venture capital and begin on the right foot and still crumble. However, there is always that chance to revive your start-up if you re-focus the aim why your start-up was intended to exists in the first place and as such you must be flexible to make changes where possible.
I hope that the five points discussed in this article will go along way in helping your start-up that is showing signs of crumbling to revive back to business.
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