What makes a startup business successful?

I guess the answer is you. I get my thermostat from investors. When they are interested in a business I try to understand why, to know what are the factors of success. and I found out that almost all investors tend to invest in the entrepreneurs rather than the idea.

There are many ideas out there, but they never raised above the ground, and other more modest ideas that hit the sky. Why? simply because the entrepreneurs believed in it, worked it out, were flexible enough to change their strategy to achieve their goals, but they never changed their idea to satisfy an investor.

When I say the entrepreneur, I mean the team, not you by yourself, again investors tend to like teams more than individuals. Get co-founders, if you were able to get more on board other than you, this will give more confidence to the investors that you were able to get the buy in of others on board before them.

Another point is balancing business and technology, to have a success story you must have a mix, a business to tame the technology and a technology to polish the business. One by its own will not give you success, so make sure that your team has this balance.

Last funding VS bootstrapping, If you have an idea that needs lots of money, don't ever think of having a business model that generates money to fund the idea, cause you will get distracted and this is the main reason for failure. If you need money get investment. If you can work with your own fund, and your business model will generate revenue soon, bootstrap, don't waste your energy on investors, rather try to get them on board as advisory board with small %, this will give you their experience without the headache of convincing them to pay and with a little bite of your company.

This answer depends on you and your goals. What are you looking for out of a startup? Helping others? Fame? Market Creation? There could be so many different paths you pursue here. I think the key is to figure out what it is specifically you're after in your business and achieve it.

What's a business you really like and pay money for? We use this service called Pingdom to monitor our site. If it ever goes down, I get a text message right away and can go fix it. It's a great service because it's something I really need and it works beautifully. I'd consider this a successful business. I like to do this to think of businesses who I want to emulate.

There are always the basic milestones as well:

• First working version
• First consumers of your product
• First paying customer

But the nice thing about running a business is that success is wherever you define it.

Hello,

This answer assumes that you are already in operation as a business (i.e an on-going concern). If not The answer might change (Please then do specify how far along are you).

In the most concise manner and from a more financial skewed point of view:

Measuring success for an on-going concern firm on a macroscopic level is correlated to how well have you already performed and whats your future performance plan, in relation to one of the following goals:

-Maximizing Shareholder Profit.

-Maximizing firm's value.

Its usually one of the above mentioned goals or a combination of both.

Who decides what is the goal? The People who have invested capital in the firm.

The default perception is "Maximizing Shareholder Profit" but sometimes taking that path "might" lead to destroying company value and failure on the long term.

How do you achieve those goals? Using Strategies and tactics related to the management of your business, your marketing plan, your products..etc..etc.

This is not exclusive as sometimes people create firms for different purposes. But this is the concise answer.

Regards,

Roland