Deciding to become an entrepreneur is exciting. This choice can lead to financial freedom, better leadership skills, increased confidence, and more control over your day-to-day. With so many advantages, you can significantly enhance the quality of your life, but as with all good things, experiencing these benefits doesn’t come easy.
Running a business is hard, and it can be even more challenging when you make typical startup mistakes. Of course, blunders are an inevitable part of the process—you can’t avoid every mishap along your entrepreneurship journey. However, there are usual missteps that you can dodge to make your path to success a little easier. For those of you wondering what those are, don’t worry. Here are seven common startup mistakes founders make that you can easily evade.
1. Ignoring Feedback
One of the fastest ways to sink your business is to ignore constructive feedback. When customers, investors, or venture capitalists give you valuable insight on how to improve, don’t miss the opportunity to not only listen but implement their suggestions.
Oftentimes, business owners are so in love with their ideas, products, services, or methods that they don’t see things clearly and refuse to make changes. But those attachments can become the very reasons you unintentionally stifle business growth. That’s not to say that every piece of advice is worth implementing, but when constructive feedback is coming from people who can determine your brand’s success or have a vested interest in seeing it succeed, you should take their opinions seriously.
2. Doing poor market research
When you’re so excited to become an entrepreneur, it may be tempting to skip one of the most foundational steps to having a successful business: completing thorough market research. Understanding whether your product or service will add value to your target audience will determine whether you should move forward with it. That’s why you genuinely need to interview potential customers and not just three or five of them. You should speak to 20-30 people to see if they find value in your business or have similar pain points that you can address.
3. Hiring the wrong people
Having a few bad hires is normal here and there. You won’t always get the perfect person in every role the first time you try. However, you shouldn’t have a losing track record when it comes to hiring good people, but so many entrepreneurs do.
Putting together a bad team is such a common startup mistake that there’s a whole book dedicated to helping founders get better at it, and it’s called Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. The book lists many of the wrong approaches that entrepreneurs use when hiring, including the sponge, art critic, prosecutor, suitor, chatterbox, and trickster methods. All of these lead to bad hiring decisions, which can cost as much as $240,000, although some estimates suggest that unsuccessful hiring can cost a business $1.5 million or more a year.
If you want to evade such significant financial loss—and all the wasted hours you’d spend training someone—you need to ensure you attack hiring appropriately.
4. Making bad investments
It’s easy to think you need all the bells and whistles when starting your business, but the reality is that you don’t. You don’t need every SEO software. You don’t need every project management tool. And you don’t need the most expensive CMS platform. Besides the high financial costs of getting more than you need, buying too much at once can be challenging to keep up with and cause you and your team to wonder what platforms are used for what projects.
If you want to keep things simple and cost-effective, invest in the necessities. Buy the things your team actually needs for marketing, sales, and internal organization and communication. Doing so will ensure you don’t overspend and find yourself going bankrupt or needing to make significant cuts to stay afloat.
5. Overworking
Another common but disregarded startup mistake is overworking. This mishap is easy to downplay since you’re expected to work extremely hard as an entrepreneur, especially when facing pressure from investors. But working 80 hours per week isn’t healthy and is a straight shot towards burnout and mental fatigue. When you start experiencing those things, it can become significantly difficult to work and focus, defeating the very purpose of your decision to put in an insane number of hours. So, if you want to have a sustainable lifestyle that allows you to give 100% every day, you need to avoid overworking and take time to prioritize self-care and personal relationships.
6. Lack of organization
Do you have processes in place for onboarding new hires, jumpstarting marketing campaigns, implementing sales strategies, providing excellent customer service, and increasing employee engagement and performance? If not, the disorganization is a startup mistake that can cost you time and money. Even working without a defined list of priorities can be bad for business as it can hinder you from tackling the most important projects and give you wiggle room to focus on any and every task that suddenly pops up.
A successful company isn’t directionless—it knows what to focus on and how to get things done. So for your startup to succeed, you need to have processes and priorities in place so that you and everyone else are set up to crush each day.
7. Downplaying marketing
Oftentimes, sales can become such a priority that marketing gets tossed to the side. But any successful entrepreneur will tell you that marketing plays a crucial role in enhancing your brand’s chances of survival. Good marketing leads to sales and long-term relationships with customers who repeatedly buy from you. It also helps you speak to your target audience and even attract top talent so that it’s easier to hire.
Marketing is not something you can or should overlook when building your startup. If you truly want to succeed in a competitive environment—which isn’t limited to one industry but seen in every industry today—you need to prioritize marketing just as much as you prioritize sales. Otherwise, your business may not be around for long.
Elude the avoidable to experience the best
Creating a business isn’t easy, but reducing the difficulty of the task also isn’t impossible. All you have to do is become aware of typical startup mistakes and try to avoid them. Sidestepping common mishaps will allow you to focus on the unexpected failures that pop up and give you a better chance of experiencing all the benefits of entrepreneurship.