What’s the single most important thing you need to do before you start building your startup? Do you know that the answer to that question could include a nearly infinite number of things you that you could or should do before building your startup? Everything from sizing up the competition to getting advice from friends, family, partners and mentors generally comes before you begin building, but what’s the most important thing?
Know Your Business
Know your products, know your image, know what emotion you want to invoke in customers when they think of your products or services. And then put it into a package that unifies those things.
From The Ground Up
Before you begin building, you have the task of designing your startup from the ground level. You’ll need a strong foundation if you want your venture to survive infancy, so looking before you leap is imperative.
This is the stage where you question your motives, sanity, goals and desires. It’s natural to be a little disorganized, but focus on sorting through all the off-shoots, concerns, questions and questionable decisions you’ve had up to this point to begin getting rid of the dead weight and getting your tools in order.
Start by knowing your industry, competitors and potential consumer market. Being familiar with these three areas helps you to begin building a strong foundation for your company going forward. As you begin to design the look and feel you want for your future success, this information will start to sculpt and refine your plans before you’ve ever started on your presence.
Next, start looking at what you want your company to look like to consumers. Part of having a successful startup depends on designing one that will be memorable and accessible to customers.
As consumers, we identify companies and brands that we know with emotions and events that we’ve experienced the brand in association with. Is your company going to be a ’round the clock party, or is it something with a little more sophistication? What will your target market appreciate more? Asking yourself these questions before you start building is key to not wasting time or resources later having to redesign so you can refocus on the customers that should have been your focus from day one.
Craft An Image
Next, you need to start putting those level one decision and ideas into an identity that customers can identify with and relate to. This is where you decide about things like your logo, brand colors, fonts and other specifics.
As a startup that hasn’t yet begun, you have to craft your image from nothing or risk not having a cohesive, reliable design for customers to associate with your products and services. No matter how big or small you intend to make your company down the line, planning this out will never be a step to skip. To be memorable, you must find unique ways to craft your image brand your products and present your services to consumers.
Standing out from the crowd of similar items on the shelf isn’t easy, but failing to do so damns your business to obscurity, and no one wants to see their attempts fail for lack of planning.
This is where companies like Designhill step in to offer their assistance. Logo Design by Designhill takes some of the pressure off of you and puts it into the hands of artists skilled at crafting pieces that will contribute to the overall image you hope to craft.
Your logo needs to be unique and memorable, easy on the eyes and different enough from other products that it can’t be mistaken for them. Graphic designers have all the know-how to take the image you want to be creating, and turn it into an image that is.
Supporting Your Work
Once you’ve put all the work into a solid foundation and a cohesive brand image, you need to focus your efforts onto supplementing that work so it doesn’t fall apart when you start building.
Choosing advertisement methods, locations and making your products and services accessible to your target market become the order of the day. You’ve had to make a lot of assumptions to get to this point, so start putting them to the test now.
Run trials, check your work and double check and never stop researching new methods, approaches and potential markets just because you’ve settled on one to start with.
In Conclusion
There’s no one most important thing to do before you build a startup. In fact, almost everything important about building a start up happens before you begin building but it’s all part of the process of knowing your goals and focusing in on what you need to do to make them a reality.
From getting new customers to designing your advertising, everything you do for your company should be designed to bring the elements together into one harmonious image that customers know and find appealing. If you can succeed at doing that, you’ll have an easier time keeping your fledgling startup up and running.