How Can A Young Tech Company Compete Against Established Players In The Market?
Startups should never, ever, never compete with big companies. They must offer something different. “Differentiated” is the most important word in designing a startup market entry strategy.
Look at this diagram and decide how you can adjust your company to be in the top right quadrant. Without that you have no chance of surviving, never mind profiting, because you will compete with companies 100 to 1,000,000 times larger than you with already developed marketing and sales channels and huge budgets.
Only these kinds of companies will attract investors (needed to grow) and top employees because they know the stock options can be game changers for their personal wealth.
Over 80% of startups fail because they do not prepare well. This takes 15+ years' experience with 5 going to learning some technical or industry skills, 5 going to learning to hire and manage...
What Are The Key Skills And Qualities That Every Successful Entrepreneur Possesses?
The personality traits that a strong entrepreneur must have include:
- Tenacity and the ability to ignore naysayers when they have deeper understanding of the problem the company is trying to solve
- Vision - The ability to see the future trend they are either creating or trying to leverage
- Intelligence - The critical thinking skills to properly weigh the many factors that are needed for most business decisions
- Leadership - The ability to convince others to follow them which comes from showing the skills and personality traits listed here
- Management skills to recruit and manage quality people, especially managers and people with passion to build out the needed skill sets
- Innovation - The ability to see beyond what the solution to the problem is today and design a significantly better one that can be delivered with a profit
- Focus - The ability to focus on one...
What Skills and Qualities are Essential for Leadership?
The most important traits of quality leaders are integrity, good management and people skills, the ability to see the future (need or market) and communicate that vision to their team and others. Obviously, some domain/industry expertise in the areas you are executing. Some may call this “Selling the vision” and that can be to employees, investors, vendors or anyone. A leader aligns all parties needed to proceed forward, including all stakeholders.
I define leadership as when you do not have to look back because you know people are following you because they want to and believe in accomplishing the mission. Not because they have to, or because of a corporate hierarchy. Shackelton's Adventures is a great story on leadership, I recommend everyone read or view the documentary. He saved all those lives on a disastrous voyage through strong leadership.
Leadership is very different from management. Managers coerce people with...
