7/10 Focus on revenue and not on scale

Having been your team in place you need to focus on “sales” or “revenue”. The main driver of success for start-up is a revenue, whatever is the size of business the revenue is blood for it. The start-up should focus on revenue and increasing profitability from day one. Generally, the start-up focuses on building their idea or product for future recurring revenue, instead of revenue that is currently available, which can cause both demand and supply challenges as well as growth.

In early stage of start-ups, the founders rely on investments but always remember that dealing with investors, going through due diligence process is very time consuming. In this, there is no guarantee that you will able to raise funding from investors. The best way will be to spend your energy on building revenue and operation. You have to prioritize revenue and customer relationship. You should focus on your customer who are ready to pay. Bringing the first few customers not only builds confidence but it also helps you to improve your product or idea.  Once you have the paying customers then other things will happen with ease. If you don’t have customer to pay then you have the hobby not business.

You can enhance your existing customer base through referral programmes that is advantage to your existing user for successfully bringing new users. For e.g. Paypal, goibibo, Ola and Uber are examples of start-ups who have successfully increased their revenue through user base. You can effectively apply technique of “Upselling” which means selling the related products and services which can create a huge demand for main product. For e.g. in electronics, selling goods along with warranty and guaranty etc.

You have to focus on generating revenue which should not be understood in a way that scaling is to be ignored. Scaling is important but what we want to emphasise is the “timing”. Once business is surviving and revenue is flowing to the business now you can think of growth and scaling. Scaling the business in right way makes the real growth and some extra income that too without the extra work. Scaling helps the business to become a giant without complexities and troubles, the only thing is it should be grown in structured way.

To conclude, I would say each startup differ based on their industry practices. Generating sales is not key in every industry but eventually revenue is. But in my opinion, the focus on revenue, creating user base and selling the brand will be advantage for your venture.

                            ©Pratima Gupta & Co.|| All Rights Reserved

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