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Running a Successful Startup in Pakistan

Running a Successful Startup in Pakistan

1. Get your Startup off the Ground

The first step is always the most challenging, the part where you actually take the leap of faith and step up to start your own business. To get your Startup up and running, once you have launched having a strong marketing strategy is most important. Retaining customers and making new sales mostly depends on marketing.

2. Defining your Startup’s Target Audience

Target Audience is a particular group or individual towards whom a product sale is aimed. The target audience belongs to a certain age demographic for example for a product like baby diapers having the end user as a baby but the customer actually is the baby mother who could fall into an age demographic between 21- 35 years of age in a Pakistani setting. So, advertisements designed for these women are targeted to gain a mother’s trust for her baby to purchase these products. It is also important to see the earning capacity of the target audience. If your target audience falls in a certain earning bracket then it is important to price the product accordingly. The interests of your target audience also. Play a vital role in the kind of advertisements designed and also the kind of platforms are used to market the products. Placement is also an important part of the process. For example, baby mother’s grocery stores are the primary source of accessing baby diapers and marketing them there is definitely an added advantage. Eventually profiling your target audience is the primary way to have a clear image of who the end consumer for the product is and what will attract the end consumer the most to close a sale.

3. How to Sell to your Customers – Customer Development (Testing out if there is a market for your product)

It is always preferred to sample out to a small audience of the customer segment to assess response and feedback. Product sampling and running a pilot test is always preferred to determine the market for your product. Taking feedback as a measure to improve the product is also a way to sell better to your customers.

Customer development is a process with some steps involved. Once you have discovered your target market and found a problem solution fit, it is important to do customer validation through an initial product testing. This will help you determine a product – market fit. Once that is established a sales and marketing road-map and a business model can be determined. At the customer validation stage, it is easy to pivot back in case the initial market rejects the product or demands a change in the version. This can help in improving the product as well as have a safe scale execution after the initial testing. This process of customer development can then lead to company building.

4. Showing the World you Exist (and how to get early traction)
Early traction are the early adopters, the initial individuals who gave a chance to your product. These are the most important customers as they saw value in your product and went ahead and tried it out in their precious time because they saw a solution to their problem through your product. The product – market fit comes into existence when the product feature set and value proposition interact with the right target market and understands the needs of that target market.

5. Bootstrapping your Growth with Crowd

Sourcing & Crowd Funding
The Growth of a business and scaling up is dependent on capital and also the nature of product and business industry.

Crowdfunding Is a technique for raising funds for a business from a large number of people. This could be through friends, family, groups or investors or even customers. There are multiple ways to do it, through social media, crowdfunding platforms or anyone who can offer their network for such purpose. In return the business offers either a reward, an early bird discount or sometimes even equity that varies from business to business.

Crowd sourcing is a way of sourcing information and power of a crowd to speed up a process. For example, using a Facebook community to ask about a particular bank. Mostly crowd sourcing is through an online community.

6. Hiring, Personas & Punching up the Product

The individuals you hire for setting up your start up in Pakistan also have a personality that has to match their role and their work. The individual should be able to work in an industry, definitely have the required education and then the personality required for that role. A personality assessment at the initial interviews is paramount to determine the role of the person.