Tools of the trade

In this article you will learn about some very important tools that will help you massively in your entrepreneurial journey. These tools aren’t easily dispensed by leaders in the area because they come with experience and not all experiences are the same. This could also mean that some owners may not be interested to share their secretive steps or tools.

Anyways, below are some pointers you should keep in mind. This is not a full list by any means. These are some of the points that the founders of Skillioma wished they knew or someone told them. There is no better teacher than experience.

Develop Entrepreneurial mindset: Don’t ever get carried away by people telling you not to take the risk. At the same time, don’t take uncalculated risks. Without any risk, you cannot move forward in life, not just only a startup journey, but in general, anything new you do will involve clear risk.

Be Lean and Agile: As much possible, don’t spend too much investment in the beginning. Be lean as much as you can. For example, try to hire people that have two or three skills in one person and hire entry level people and train them. Initially you may be spending more time on them, but definitely worth it if you are spending on the right person. Maintain agility. Move swiftly but carefully. Evaluate, analyse a problem quickly and take the next step. 

Don’t overthink: Sometimes it helps not to think too much. Not just sometimes, almost always the first thought is more accurate and powerful in general than the thought we arrive at after long thinking. 

Create To-Do lists: There are two types of people, visionaries and implementers when it comes to a start up. And the implementers always jump into implementation before thinking about what steps need to be done and in what order. No matter what kind of personality type you are, don’t underestimate the power of To-do lists, check lists or the tracking apps.

Market Survey or Research

Quite a few, almost all the startups rather fail because they did not conduct the market survey or research well before they invested in their idea. And since technology is taking over every single domain there is, the startup founders tend to spend too much money initially on technology before even making their prototype or Minimum Viable Product(MVP). Conducting extensive research, understanding your audience and arriving at data analysis will help you eliminate several twisty turns that you may need to take to make revenues later in the business.

Understanding the business model

While it is not necessary that you perfectly carve out a business model as part of planning, it is definitely a much needed effort to come to a good understanding of your business model. Is it a B2B or B2C or B2B2C model and is it subscription based or commodity based etc. If you have understood your model, look at the volumes and competition in the area. And don’t forget to tie this directly to your marketing strategy.

The pivoting game

In technical terms, pivots are those that are central points which will help balance. In business terms pivoting means fundamentally changing the direction so you can maximise revenues. Take the ‘less is more’ attitude when pivoting your business, focus on a feature than the entire solution. Do this only after you exhaust all your options.

Connected disciplines

Ever since you started your education from Kindergarten, when you focused on a subject(or discipline), you just focused on that one area. For example, English is English, Math is only math etc. But you know English is connected to all the real world communication aspects as it’s a global language and it requires skills more than learning grammar and sentence structure. It requires verbal, written and listening skills too. But we don’t pay attention to this kind of learning. Likewise, Entrepreneurship does not mean raising funding, market surveys, ideation, implementation, technology. But it also means marketing, lean and agile models, team work, decision making, budgeting, and even economics. Economics because you need to understand the market in terms of numbers. So, pay attention to connect several aspects of your concept or business idea to real world disciplines which will help you create an integrated plan for your implementation.

Here you go! Some of the best tools of trade for your entrepreneurial journey. Hope this helps you attain success.