How to become a billion dollar startup?

Everyone these days is running behind this one fancy word, Startup.

Some are trying to solve a problem, some are looking out as the next opportunity to make some dollars and some are still wanna-preneurs.

But, what does it take to take-off your startup to the money making machine.

1. Don’t think money

The very basic requirement to earn big is not too think about it. You should keep your product and business on top of everything.

All successful businesses never thought about money at first, they were always focused on making the Quality product and hence creating an impact to more and more possible users.

Source

P.S: Product is a collection of what you are selling along with your user base.

Let me clear this better.

Product is not just your selling item but also the customers who use your product.

I read somewhere, if you are not paying to use a product then you are the product of that company.

(Theoretically we all are a Medium’s product)

Because Medium is getting paid by publishers/donors, because we all awesome people are its product.

P.S: Medium has a simple and very cool editor

a. Why am I explaining this?

Because if you observe the big billion dollar companies you would notice a pattern, these all have a huge user base.

E.g Google earns a lot of money using it’s ad services but imagine when they started who would have paid them to publish ads.

So what Google did are the next two points.

2. More than anything else, solve a problem

Google focused on a solution, a simple and effective search engine.

There were search engines prior to Google. But they solved some problems pretty well and presented a fair policy to rank pages.

As per my opinion, startup is something that solves a problem not the ones who are the by product of money making desires.

3. Provide a quality product to your product

Source

That’s intriguing, but if we assume that your users are your product then,

You should always give a quality experience to the users

a. Why?

1. Your users will be your best marketers.
2. Users will be ready to pay for your services.
3. Users will be engaged and you will get a lot of market feedback to improve further.

Many money making businesses get closed as they only focus on money, because

They post a lot of ads

Give bad user experience to the users

Unnecessary redirects to ads

Ask for more downloads etc

b. Take an example of WhatsApp

They did nothing but presented a simple, wonderful, useful and effective application.

No ads, no fee, no bad experience.

Even old age people find WhatsApp very easy to use.

Quality is the only thing that will fetch dollars :-P

4. Run for user volume, money​ will follow.

Again if your product is good, try to get more people on board.

Money can always be earned later.

Like Google is a billion dollar company, that too when they don’t charge end users(directly, for most of the products) but enterprises.

a. Get more users on board, because

1. More users points to a quality product.
2. Quality product means investments, acquisitions and paying users too.
3. More users, more viewpoints means more bullet points to improve further.
4. It increases your reach, when you want to launch something new you have a wide audience to reach to your new product very first day.

b. Make the product for everyone

Source

Try to make your product usable/accessible for all. To get a large piece of cake, you need to be friends with bakers :-P

If you want to capture a large chunk of market, you need to make the product for all.

Like whatsapp introduced video and voice calls.

Imagine the reach of whatsapp.

1. Initally, people with internet connection were using whatsapp
2. Now, imagine if someone doesn’t have tarrif to make call (for a while ofcourse), they can use Whatsapp for calling.
3. Old age people who can’t type, can now talk to other people using Whatsapp’s video calling
4. Whatsapp enables you to share documents on the go.
5. Shopping is a lot easier especially for female mates around ;-)

Many similar products came into market, but none could shiver the place of WhatsApp platform.

More over,

Money is a by-product of a good and quality product.

If money is your motto, start a business not a startup.

(Business- start a lemonade stand)

(Startup- Come up with lemonade sachets that lasts 30 days)

Go for quality product and happy users, money will follow

Hit the 💚 button to make it reachable for more audience.

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