Starting a tech business isn’t any different than starting a coffee shop, car repair shop, or an insurance company. You need to come up with the same type of paperwork, money, and personnel that you do with any other business. To set up a tech business, here are five things that you will need to do.
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Get Funding
It goes without saying that you will need a great deal of money to get your tech company off the ground. Unless you have a steady stream of cash, your business will fail before it gets the chance to start. Fortunately, there are many sources for small business financing.
Along with organizations like the Small Business Administration, you may be able to find financing by pitching your idea to investors in exchange for equity in the company. Many tech companies get money through crowdfunding on websites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, GoFundMe, and several others.
Some of the strangers you meet on crowdfunding sites maybe angel investors. They may love your ideas and want to give you substantial sums of money to start your company.
Discover Focus of Company
Although you have an idea for a business, you need to flesh it out and decide whether it is a product or service. Once you make that decision, you will have the focus of your business. Then you can concentrate all your efforts on designing the product or finding out how to deliver the service.
Your product or service will also require people to help create and test it, promote it, and then decide where and how to sell it. Finding the focus of your business is just the beginning of the adventure of owning a business.
Write a Business Plan
Making out a business plan is necessary to get funding from traditional financial sources that you will need to start and run your company. When writing the plan, you should think about where you want your business to be in three to five years and create it from that perspective.
A business plan can help guide you as your company starts to grow since it is a projection of where you want your business to be in the near future. Plan each section and write out the specifics, using it as a road map as you build your company.
You can write either a traditional business plan or a lean startup. The traditional plan goes into more detail in each section and is the most common type that entrepreneurs write. Lean startups are less common, but they also require less work.
Instead of going into detail, lean startup plans summarize each point. They are concise and are usually about one page long.
Set Company Goals
While this isn’t something that you acquire, it is still a crucial part of planning your business. You need to set a trajectory for what you will be doing. Do you desire to sell a product on Amazon and in stores around the country or is your service going to be online only?
If you don’t set up and track business goals, they can quickly get lost in the shuffle of everything you do daily. Not tracking them can cause you to lose sight of your vision for the business you’ve dreamed about for years.
Business goals can be categorized into three types:
- Long-term Goals
- Short-term Goals
- Visionary Goals
For setting goals, sit down and consider what progress you want to make in a day, week, month, year, five years, etc. Those are your long- and short-term goals. While your visionary goals may revolve around growth and profits, they should also include service and social goals.
Name Your Business
Picking a business name can be difficult. Although you may have one in mind as you work on the company, there could be other businesses with the same name. Also, a website domain under the name may not be available. In some cases, the business name may not make sense.
If there is already a business using the name that you like, find out what they do. If you’re creating an app or computer component and the other company bakes pies, then you could still use the name. After all, no one is going to confuse a bakery for a computer parts manufacturer or an app.
There are many ways to conduct searches on the names. You select several names for your business and search them all. Try doing a trademark search by searching your state’s Secretary of State site, as well as a domain search.
The goal is to get a catchy name with correct spelling and one that you will be happy with using. While that’s a tall order, a great name is vital to the success of your company.
Conclusion
These five items are just the beginning of the many things you will need to do to open your business. You will also need to hire staff, find a physical location, or build a site, register your company, buy permits, and build your product or service.
Although the list will seem never-ending, it is a good way to start a business of your own.