From thinking about the problem your product or service is trying to solve to asking for help when you need it, here are 17 answers to the question, "What are tips you'd offer a young entrepreneur starting up a new venture?"
Attend to the Customer’s Needs First
Be an Expert in Your Industry
Know Your Market
Avoid Mixing Business and Family Together
Remain Open to Collaboration
Remember, You Don't Have to Have It All Figured Out
Try New Ideas With Freelancers
Find a Great Mentor
Craft a Strong Brand Identity
Charge for Your Product from Day One
Surround Yourself With the Right People
Pre-Plan and Put Things in Writing Before You Launch
Don't Limit Yourself to Your Background
Embrace Failures and Iterate Your Idea
Engage With Your Customers
Gauge Customer Loyalty Through Micro Surveys
Nobody Does It Alone, Ask for Help and You Will Succeed
Attend to the Customer’s Needs First
Starting a new business venture is very exciting, but it's important to ensure your new venture is solving a need for your target audience. When considering your new venture, think about the problem your product or service is trying to solve. From there, you might survey your target audience to get a sense of what features, benefits, and functionality would be beneficial to them.
By doing this, you know your efforts are going to focus on solving for the customer first. When you take this approach, you ensure you're focusing your efforts as an entrepreneur on the most meaningful projects and initiatives to move your business forward.
Elyse Flynn Meyer, Owner and Founder, Prism Global Marketing Solutions
Be an Expert in Your Industry
One tip I would give to anyone starting a new venture is to always keep learning. Technology and business are constantly developing, and in order to be successful with any venture, learn quickly, apply it, and know when to change course. Be an expert in your industry and keep learning something new every day.
Loren Howard, Founder, Prime Plus Mortgages
Know Your Market
One of the most important pieces of advice I can give to a young entrepreneur starting up a new venture is to ensure that they have a good understanding of the market their product will compete in and that they have identified their target audience. Without this crucial information, it will be difficult for them to make the right decisions for developing their product and marketing it to their audience. By educating themselves on their market and their target audience, they'll be able to create a product that applies to them and effectively reach out to them with their marketing campaigns.
Avoid Mixing Business and Family Together
There's this unwritten rule that you should never get your family involved in your business unless you're absolutely sure there's no risk involved. Far too many families have been broken up because of poor investments and businesses that didn't work out at all. Even if your company is struggling but you still want to go on and weather the storm, asking family for any big help should be a last resort, not the first.
Natalia Brzezinska, Marketing and Outreach Manager, ePassportPhoto
Remain Open to Collaboration
Remain open to the idea of collaboration. While the initial dream may be to work entirely for yourself, call all the shots, and not share any of the profits, you will probably need some help. Even if it involves some outsourcing, you eventually need to accept that you cannot always do everything alone. Be grateful to those who will help and understand that team efforts can often expedite the progress of a business.
Miles Beckett, Co-founder and CEO, Flossy
Remember, You Don't Have to Have It All Figured Out
It took me years to start my business. I thought I needed to figure out every potential problem I might face, and I wanted to create a fireproof business plan. I felt I had to think of every question and answer to prove I could do it.
But none of that is true.
It's ready for a business idea informed and confident. But the reality is there are things you simply can't plan for—don't let that stop you. You're going to run into surprises along the way. Embrace them and use that time to challenge yourself and come out a better businessperson.
You don't have to know everything to get started—simply know enough and you'll learn the rest in due time.
Alli Hill, Founder and Director, Fleurish Freelance
Try New Ideas With Freelancers
With a new venture, you need to run a lot of experiments. You may go through 50 different ideas in a year. It's important to try out new ideas without locking in the overhead, especially if it fails. This is one reason freelancers and contract laborers are so valuable at this stage of your venture. If an experiment is working, you can then ask about how to lock in the help you need, but until then, stay flexible.
Trevor Ewen, COO, QBench
Find a Great Mentor
Finding and having a great mentor can be an invaluable asset when starting up a new venture. This is also one reason I help aspiring entrepreneurs on their journeys.
For starters, a mentor can provide valuable advice and guidance based on their own industry experience. They can assist the young entrepreneur in avoiding common pitfalls and navigating the challenges of starting a new business.
Second, they can provide constructive feedback and act as a sounding board for new ideas. This feedback can improve the entrepreneur's business plan, product or service offerings, and marketing strategies. This will also help entrepreneurs to develop confidence in their decision-making abilities.
Finally, a mentor can provide valuable networking opportunities. They can connect the young entrepreneur with industry key players, potential investors, and other mentors who can help them grow their business.
Johannes Larsson, Founder and CEO, JohannesLarsson.com
Craft a Strong Brand Identity
Starting a new venture can be both exciting and daunting for a young entrepreneur. One useful tip to ensure success is to focus on creating a strong brand identity from the outset. This involves developing a clear understanding of the business's mission, values, and target audience. By doing so, young entrepreneurs can create a brand that resonates with their audience and sets them apart from competitors.
A strong brand identity can also help to build trust and loyalty among customers. To create a strong brand identity, entrepreneurs should consider elements such as the business's name, logo, messaging, and visual identity.
These should be consistent across all marketing materials, including the website, social media channels, and promotional materials. By investing time and resources in creating a strong brand identity, entrepreneurs can establish a solid foundation for their new venture, which can lead to long-term success.
Bryor Mosley, Career Coach, Southern New Hampshire University
Charge for Your Product from Day One
Start charging for your product immediately. By charging for your product from the start, you validate its value to customers. You’ll also gain crucial revenue to reinvest in the business and foster a sense of commitment from users. Don't undervalue your work or hesitate to ask for compensation.
Daniel Gjokaj, CEO, Tolt
Surround Yourself With the Right People
If I were speaking one-on-one with a young entrepreneur who was starting up a new venture, I would tell them to be picky about the people they surround themselves with. Some people will support them and offer excellent advice in supporting them, while other people will be untruthful, unsupportive, and maybe even harmful to their success.
You must find the right people to surround yourself with and you must pick wisely. It's a crucial step in being a successful entrepreneur.
Hire the right people, find the right mentors, partner with the best partners, and don't just let anyone into your circle. Be choosy and make the right decisions for you.
David Curtis, Founder and CEO, Blue Pig Media
Pre-Plan and Put Things in Writing Before You Launch
When young entrepreneurs begin a new venture, I would advise them to do what they can to keep expectations realistic and on a smart path they have laid out for themselves.
Therefore, pre-planning is so important and I can't stress it enough. Before something takes off, I recommend you sit down and write out a plan. Where would you like to be at this stage and how long should something take you? Create a roadmap for yourself that you feel would be realistic and expected.
Then, once things pick up and actually happen, you'll always have this to refer to. You might blow the expectations out of the water, but you'll ground yourself in the clear plan you had before things actually started, which can help keep you on a smooth road to success.
Research, pre-planning, and getting things down on paper can be an enormous asset for you once you launch your new venture and are in the middle of it every day.
James Parsons, Founder, Content Powered
Don't Limit Yourself to Your Background
One tip I'd give a young entrepreneur is to not be afraid of going in a completely new direction. With a background in electrical engineering, entrepreneurship wasn't an obvious path for me to take. When I started my first business, I had zero entrepreneurial experience. But I took the risk and ended up scaling my current business to seven figures (this was the fourth business I started)—just seven months after quitting my nine-to-five. So, don't limit yourself to your background or current skills. If you're willing to learn, you can start a successful venture even if you don't have any experience yet.
Luisa Zhou, Founder, LuisaZhou.com
Embrace Failures and Iterate Your Idea
One of the most important tips for a young entrepreneur starting a new venture is to embrace failures and iterate their ideas. It's okay to fail or face rejection, as it happens to everyone in their entrepreneurial journey. Use these failures as a stepping stone and learn from them to improve your product or service.
Constant iteration and improvement based on user feedback build a better product that meets market demands. Don't be afraid to pivot your idea if the current one isn't working out. The key is to keep learning, iterating, and improving until you find a winning solution. Remember, progress over perfection.
Anirban Saha, Founder, TechBullish
Engage With Your Customers
Brands that consistently engage with their customers to gain their trust and loyalty, hence they can experience sustainable growth over a longer period. If you are starting your venture, prioritize customer engagement in your goals and have a team member or employ tools that allow you to track and measure customer sentiment consistently. This data will give you insights into improving your engagements and positioning your new venture as the go-to option, even in a crowded market with multiple options.
Liam Liu, Co-founder and CMO, ParcelPanel
Gauge Customer Loyalty Through Micro Surveys
One tip I would offer a young entrepreneur is to focus on customer loyalty by looking for feedback and using it. A way to do this is through micro surveys, sending out extremely short questionnaires occasionally to customers when they purchase something from you or subscribe to your service. This gives you in-depth knowledge about their experience with the product and assists you greatly in making better decisions, which will help keep the loyalty of that customer.
Julia Kelly, Managing Partner, Rigits
Nobody Does It Alone, Ask for Help and You Will Succeed
Don't be afraid to ask for help. Whether it's advice, money, or connections, you don't have to do it alone—most successful entrepreneurs rarely do. Your network is your safety net. You'll likely adjust and pivot your business dozens of times early on as you work to figure out market fit, acquisition, operations, costs, and the like.
If you have a reliable support structure, it will make all these pivots infinitely easier to execute—and execution is the only thing that really matters in the end. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but the execution separates the success stories from the flops.
Michael Beck, Founder, vetranks.com