If you’re an entrepreneur, there’s a good chance you’re always looking for ways to improve your business. That’s why it’s essential to have a tech startup to-do list.
A good to-do list will help you stay organized and on track, so you can focus on what’s important – building your business.
A tech startup to-do list helps you stay organized by designing and automating your workflow. It helps you maintain that state of productivity, stay focused on what’s important, and get things done that much faster.
People often have a hard time managing their priorities for which tasks need to be done. To focus more on essential items, it’s helpful to list all that needs doing and then prioritize these tasks according to importance.
A starter to-do list for a tech startup should be comprised of the following seven steps:
1. Decide On The Tech Startup Company’s Goal And Product
The first thing to do is figure out your company’s goal and product so that you can focus on achieving it.
What are some of the most common goals? A few examples include:
- Gain more customers – This could mean offering discounts to new customers or creating targeted marketing campaigns.
- Improve customer service – Offer 24/7 support and offer email responses within 12 hours.
- Increase revenue – Create different products with higher prices to increase profit margins.
The definition of success varies from person to person. Still, we can all agree that we want our business or project idea to be a massive hit with customers and investors alike.
The question of “What is my startup company trying to accomplish?” can help spur some creative thinking about how you want investors, employees, and customers to look at your business in ten years.
Set ambitious goals for yourself so that when people say, “Where are you going with this?” you will have an answer prepared.
The product itself does not have to dominate the startup company to succeed. As an entrepreneur building a web-based service or mobile app, success can be measured by whether founders effectively use their products to reach out to their target audiences and generate profit.
Ultimately, startups are not just about creating a great product but looking at business models that will allow them to turn it into profit. No one should disregard the need for profitability when discussing what makes a company successful.
Mark Zuckerberg did not build Facebook to dominate social media; he made it because he wanted people from different colleges to look up what others were doing on campus.
Successful tech startup goals are usually to “Create an industry or market” or “Transform an existing market.” If your goal isn’t one of those two, you have a greater chance of failure.
2. Choose A Tech Startup Business Model To Pursue
Choosing a suitable business model is essential to your success. There are many different options, so it can be challenging to decide which one is right for you. This guide will help you narrow down your choices and make the best decision for your new venture.
There are many different types of business models. It all depends on what services and products your company is providing. Let us take a look at seven:
- Product-based – Sell the technology you create, either as an upfront fee for hardware or software license or through recurring payments. It is geared to businesses with budgets for this sort of thing.
- SaaS – Rent out your service or product over the internet on a month-by-month basis for a predetermined fee, E.g., Salesforce Inc Basic Service Agreement.
- Paid Acquisition – Building your customer base online by paying websites and other advertisers to include links to your site from their advertisements. Capital required from the beginning is from finding advertising space on various websites and social media platforms that offer free marketing space in exchange for advertisement views.
- Traditional funding model – the startup is founded with external investment, creates a product or service, grows the business to make it viable, and raises additional capital through an IPO or sale. The majority of large tech companies are funded this way.
- The ‘freemium’ service model relies on attracting users who can be converted to paid users through customer success techniques, upselling features/benefits, cross-selling other products or affiliates marketing programs, or lead generation projects based on their interests or use patterns. There are free trial periods to give prospects a chance to evaluate the full capability before leveraging any recurring fees.
- The ‘traditional’ software services business model. Create a product that solves an existing problem, sell the product to customers by charging monthly or yearly recurring fees for service. This type of startup requires little capital upfront but does not have much profit margin.
- Affiliate Model – Starting an affiliate blog can be an excellent opportunity to generate income over time. You gain more traffic and links from other blogs or websites that want your content. Send readers into Amazon or another retailer’s store via your link for referral fees, then earn $25 – $80 per sale with a product code linking directly to distributor purchase.
Choosing the suitable startup business model for your company can make or break you. It would help if you were sure that it’s a good fit before committing any time, money, and energy to pursue it.
Make sure to consider these four factors when deciding on which way will work best for you –
What are your strengths?
What is the industry climate like?
How much do you know about this particular type of start-up idea?
And how well does the chosen path match up with your personality traits?
I hope this article has helped you clarify which business model to pursue. If not, feel free to reach out, and we can chat more about your ideas!
3. Get Feedback From Potential Customers On Your Product Or Service
As an entrepreneur, you know that your product or service is the essential thing in the world. You’ve spent countless hours and sleepless nights making sure it’s perfect and will change someone’s life for the better.
Then it is essential to know what your target audience thinks about your product or service. They will be the ones buying and using it.
The best way to do this is by getting feedback from potential customers. What better way than with surveys?
Surveys are quick and easy to fill out, so they won’t put off filling one out. Surveys also allow you to ask specific questions rather than generic ones, which can help you get more meaningful responses from people who could end up being your future customers.
If you’re looking for a survey tool that’s both affordable and effective, then here are seven I recommend:
- Surveymonkey – One prominent feature in this application is its ability for respondents to answer the questionnaire in any language without changing settings or translating the survey into that language. It also offers quick results processing and data analysis through statistical tables so users can go back and cross-tabulate data such as what responses come from various regions, age groups, etc.
- Poll Everywhere – Create a poll with a selection of responses and results, perfect for classroom settings.
- Toluna Quick Surveys & Polls – Survey makers that best suit all different types of businesses and objectives.
- Typeform – Takes care of the groundwork, so you don’t have to! With a few clicks, any questionnaire or form can be set up in one place and distributed quickly by email, without complicated code. It’s absurdly affordable and straightforward to use.
- LimeSurvey – A free, open-source survey application written with PHP, HTML5, and CSS. LimeSurvey creates surveys to collect interest data from different perspective groups. It features more than 50 questionnaire types, graphical analysis tools for numerical questions, export to CSV or PDF files of all results or choose parts, and advanced filtering options.
- Alchemer – A free web-based software package for designing, editing, analyzing, and publishing online surveys. It’s easy to use yet powerful enough for all but the most technical survey needs. Alchemer allows you to create any type of survey and publish it either as a live survey on your organization’s website or as an exportable pdf document.
- Google Forms – Free online form builder, questionnaire creator, and data collector. Google Forms presents a simple drag-and-drop interface to simultaneously collect data from a single respondent or many respondents. Suppose you have multiple people filling out your form simultaneously. In that case, each person can be invited by email or have their responses automatically recorded by an embedded script on your website.
Getting feedback from potential customers is crucial to ensure you are on the right track with your marketing. The most effective way to learn about your customers is by asking them.
Allowing others to give their opinion of what you’re creating can only benefit your company if you take those opinions seriously and use them wisely.
4. Launch A Prototype For Initial Users To Use
Making prototypes is considered to be an essential step in the development process. Prototypes in different design stages can help prototype hardware, software, art, and rendering ideas in new ways. Ways that are not possible when working on a spreadsheet or prototype board.
Prototyping is especially crucial for technical products with users who may not have the patience for you to build off elaborate 3D models before checking your app’s basic functionality with them. A good prototype should deliver 80% of the features people expect from the final product, so one doesn’t get distracted or disillusioned by unfinished designs when trying out your early prototypes.
Fixing bugs quickly is critical. Bugs detract from the user’s ability to perform their tasks and often frustrate them in unpredictable ways. Make sure your staff responds promptly to bug reports and resolve any issues flagged before they become widespread problems that frustrate users even more than they already are when using your product or service for the first time.
5. Collect Data About How Users Interact With Your Prototype
If you’re testing a prototype, it’s a good idea to constantly observe user behaviors to ensure your projected goals are being achieved.
Be prepared by coming up with a few observations beforehand and taking notes during the process. Afterward, tally up what percentage of users did or didn’t do this or that. If there’s something big disconnect from expectations, add it to the list for feedback asking about usability issues.
Video Recording – If your prototype will be presented in person, then it would be advantageous to video record the demo and later review the video footage to identify any areas that could use improvement.
They might demonstrate unintended behaviors or provide design validation opportunities compared to competitors or internal products. This type of feedback also often addresses anomalous behavior not caught by traditional usability testing.
6. Work Through The Initial Design Challenges Of Your Website Or Application
It would help if you always took the time to work through the initial design challenges of your website or application.
Technical aspects
Problem: How can we provide a balance between simplicity and ease of use?
Solution: The only way to do either is to use something people already know how to use, WordPress CMS. This will be easier than attempting other solutions, such as developing your content management system from scratch. And it gets this problem out of the way right away, so you don’t have to worry about anything else for now.
Though there will still be other things that need figuring out in the end, like input validation, having a development partner with deep functional and relational knowledge in PHP and MySQL may help a great deal.
I’ve always admired successful designers, and I would hear them talk all the time about how they used wireframing to get their website or application idea off the ground.
During this design stage, many experienced designers like to utilize “low-fidelity” wireframes.
Low-fidelity is different from high-fidelity in that it only includes the bare necessities such as text and images; fonts; colors; spacing of blocks and grids of elements on a page (including horizontal space and vertical space; navigation buttons – and any additional secondary functionalities like menus and filters for searching or sorting information).
7. Find A Cofounder Or Employees Who Are Adaptable And Reliable
Companies need cofounders who are self-motivated, adaptive, reliable, trustworthy, and hardworking.
You want people on your team you can rely on to manage specific tasks or execute a plan when you’re not around. A new venture must find a cofounder or hire talented employees or freelancers (see below) who share the same goals and ambitions toward common goals.
People with integrity will grow into their roles, finding what they do best based on their skillsets without micromanaging.
Look for those with an entrepreneurial mindset because people from this background have always been early adopters of technologies that disrupt incumbents in established markets before moving on to new challenges – and they never shy away from anything.
Conclusion
If you’re a tech startup, there’s no better time to get started than now. With this list of tasks as your guide and the knowledge that as long as you keep learning and adapting, it’s never too late to succeed, we wish you all the best on your journey!
Quick Answers To Frequently Asked Questions
What are a few good small business startup ideas?
Service-based home business idea: Provide service for cleaning, organizing, or other projects to make other people’s homes more beautiful.
Pet sitting business idea: The pet industry is rapidly expanding and there is a need for trustworthy and professional people to care for pets while their owners are gone.
Taxi Service startup idea: Convince your town that the time has come for aspiring entrepreneurs to be able to work as cab drivers who can run independent taxi businesses without any franchise affiliation or fees. All you need is a driver’s license and some transportation.
Difference between task management and project management?
Task management is aimed at solving a single task. It can be done by yourself, and it often involves looking for the best way to solve the problem and employing the solution. You would then reach “completion” or accomplish your goal with that particular task. Project management, on the other hand, is not just about one project; it’s about those multiple tasks requiring more than some hours of work each, arising from some pre-existing idea behind this new venture.
Is a tech startup idea intellectual property?
No. Intellectual property is the kind of protection, granted by a government patent or copyright, which can help an inventor control misuse of an idea for commercial purposes.
Is a small startup checklist enough or do I need a business plan?
No, a small startup checklist does not cover the different components required when starting a business. This is why it is important to have a business plan created so you can ensure your idea will be successful and you have all bases covered before executing on it.
As a result of running through the list in detail, one should strengthen their ideas about how the company will succeed with better market research and competition analysis. There are several templates available online that may help provide guidance for things such as financial projections and sales forecasts.
Finally, one must consider whether they need legal protection from something infringing on intellectual property rights- patents or trademarks are examples of types of protections that may be useful in this situation.
Does every successful startup start with a business idea?
Yes. Every company with a successful startup had an idea that they decided to pursue.
Launching a successful company requires ideas, plans, and execution – business success is no different than anything else in life. Chances are, for every person who talks about launching their startup, there will be 100 people talking about starting one tomorrow. It’s not enough to just start something with nothing; most of the time you’ll need to start with an idea first.
Startups often fail because the original plan wasn’t grounded in what actually needs funds or partners – so having an idea can help secure those needed items ahead of time! Once you’ve got your plan down on paper- submit it for someone’s review today.
Does San Francisco have the largest tech industry?
The largest tech industry in the world is found within the Bay Area of Northern California.
It’s home to tech giants like Apple, Intel, Adobe Systems, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo who each have their headquarters here – as well as many smaller tech firms. Other large tech companies are also regionally located in the area which has earned it the nickname Silicon Valley. For example, Oracle Corporation which is based out of Redwood City, Yahoo! which has its corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, and SAP SE with its corporate headquarters in Walldorf.
Difference between seed funding angel investors and venture capitalists?
A seed angel investor is typically someone who invests his or her own money and can exist as a sole individual, one person investing in another person’s idea. A venture capitalist, on the other hand, pools investment from many people and expects a ratio of at least 5 to 1 on its portfolio of companies.
What was the biggest challenge Steve jobs faced?
One of Steve Jobs’ biggest challenges was creating the iMac, which had a design that was completely unlike anything that had come before it.
The big challenge with the old beige computer setups used to be how to navigate among the sub-menus and execute any task without having every command memorized. But Apple gave people “one button” so they could go wherever they wanted to go – whether they knew how or not.
What is a good business name idea for cloud computing?
A good business name for cloud computing would be anything with the word “cloud” in it. For example, Cloud Capital, Cloud Station. If you want something fancier or less generic sounding, look at names of things that are popular now – they will most likely stay popular for a while.
Difference between an angel investor and a business owner?
Angel investors are risk takers that support startups with lesser-known brands or ones that are running low on cash. They can often provide valuable insight to the company, seeing as they maintain an outsider view of the industry, but contribute little to its day-to-day operations.
Meanwhile, business owners are the creatives at the helm of their companies. They make many of the necessary decisions and take on much more responsibility in exchange for greater reward, financial or otherwise. Both options have vast potentials, but it all depends on what you’re looking for!
Can I do market research using google my business?
Google My Business is a very helpful tool for marketing research, as well as building an online presence for your business.
It includes company profile details such as links to social profiles, business location and contact information, hours of operation, customer reviews, photos, and videos. In addition to the profile, businesses can publish content that delivers timely content centered on their location or industry. The dashboard provides real-time insights into how visitors are interacting with the page (such as which posts they’re reading) and where on the page they click (including posts on review pages).
Can a real estate company be a sole proprietorship?
Yes, a real estate company can be a sole proprietorship.
The only prerequisite for owning and creating a sole proprietorship is that the person begins “doing business” under their own name or an assumed name. Individuals will typically do this by starting their Craigslist posts with either their name (Jane Doe) – independent agent OR “Jane Doe (independent agent)”; or we may see they include “(independent agent)” at the end of the post to let us know they are not affiliated with any particular brokerage.
Can a customer support small team request startup funding?
If you’re confident in your team’s ability to create a valuable product, then funding is just one way of many to grow. Your goal should always be sustainability, so ask yourself what it will take to get there. If the answer isn’t an investment, it doesn’t mean all hope is lost!
Other businesses often use crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo or Kickstarter for jumpstarting their business. And don’t forget about small loans – if you have good credit, banks are good places to go for little startup loans that can make all the difference between success and failure when starting out!
Do software developers use machine learning?
They sure do! Machine learning programs use predictive modeling and algorithm construction to identify patterns in data.
Machine Learning as a term is used as a blanket over many different types of techniques such as artificial neural networks, support vector machines, linear regression, K-nearest neighbor classification, etc. These techniques could be categorized into supervised and unsupervised learning approaches.
Does Google analytics pick up hacker news?
Google Analytics does not index content from the Hacker News website. Content on Hacker News is sometimes available for a limited period of time through popular search engines such as Duck Duck Go and Bing’s Instant Answers, but usually only in the form of text and not images.
Search engines like Google can’t read pages with AJAX, which is what most sites use to make their web pages dynamic and interactive. To summarize- google can’t see things that you don’t want it to; hackers might; maybe Duckduckgo or bing will show it for a second-long somewhere hidden in some corner where Google won’t see them– but if they do they’ll be off by seconds.
What is the best task manager for a tech company?
I think that this question has plagued many of us. Personally, though, I use Asana for managing my tasks. The best feature it has is the “Team” section where you can assign jobs to your colleagues and then track them just like you would any other task.
What does it take to make a venture capital firm be a potential investor?
Fast growth, high customer satisfaction rates, team members who are passionate about their customers.
While the above is just a partial list of what makes for an attractive investment opportunity to VCs, it should be much more than enough to coax them into looking your way. If you have all three qualities down pat – and maintain them throughout your company’s life – there’s no reason why they wouldn’t want to throw you some serious money.
