Here are just a few ways to completely and utterly dig your startup into the ground, as such read them, and do what you can to avoid them.

1. Have a poorly defined value proposition. Having a poorly defined value proposition will cause you headache after headache when looking at and presenting your business model. You have to know who you are targeting, what you’re offering and why they would want to use your product or service. Who is your customer?

2. Setting unrealistic objectives in your development and deployment pipeline. No matter what you think you will not underpin the world in a year, you will not have income of €20.000.000 in year one, and you will be greatly disappointed.

3. Focusing on the bottom line instead of on the service / product you offer your customers. Your customers are your lifeblood, if they are unhappy your bottom line will suffer, if they are happy, they’ll be repeat buyers, and even help market your product. Simple as that.

4. Involving yourself and your business in ethically questionable practices. Unsavory marketing practices, overly creative accounting are just some of the things that will in the end ruin your business, don’t do them.

5. Developing a product without adequately deploying resources to market it effectively. Sure, you may have a product that could cure cancer, end world hunger, and fly humans to the moon, but if no one knows about it, no one will use it. Market it, and market it effectively.

6. Going on a spending spree. Meaning, poor cash management. You may have €250.000 that you received in the form of F3 (Friends Family Fools) Capital and you think it’s great so you pay a premium for services that could otherwise be outsourced, delivered in a more cost effective way, and get everyone a brand new Mac Pro to write e-mails on. Not a good idea.

7. Launching too early or too late. Timing is everything, think about the market, the economy, the sector you’re in, where is it now, where will it be in 3 months, 6, a ear or two. You don’t have to change the world today, and launching today may lead to failure.

8. Flying solo. Think you can do everything yourself? You can’t. Involve others. Even if you’ve decided to start alone, bring in friends, talk to your network, and see if people will help you out. You don’t have to give them an equity stake in the beginning see how you work together. If you work well, ask them if they’d like to come on board.

9. Forgetting about scalability. Good ideas scale well, milti million ideas scale at their core. How big can your product realistically get? Who is your customer, and how can fast can you grow without compromising service.

10. Secrets are no fun. Talk, and share your idea with people you trust, friends, family, colleagues, these people are inevitable to the success of your business, you don’t know everything, and collaboration can more often than not fix problems before they arise.

11. Doubting your idea early on. Doubt is natural, you will have ups and downs, this is completely natural, but if you doubt your idea within the first month, or three of your start up career. Chances are you’ll become disheartened quite early on and quit. Save yourself the trouble and thoroughly analyze your concept before taking the plunge.

Good Luck!.

The word “entrepreneur” originates from early 19th century French, meaning one who undertakes an endeavour. However aside from the words origins Europe for a long time saw what in comparison to other global markets has been little activity in creating new Enterprise. Long established firms on the continent have for the most part ruled the enterprise scene, and entrepreneurship activity has been for the most part stagnant until recently.

In the past few years things however have been on the move, the UK, typically the centre of European Entrepreneurship has the scene has taken a second seat to the area around the Baltic sea, typically, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Poland. New enterprise is popping up nearly everywhere you look funneled by media reports of new tech startups such as Spotify, clean tech, sustainable energy and life sciences.

So why the change? It can be attributed to a number of factors, these being greater European Integration, open labour markets, or even initiatives such as the Baltic Entrepreneurship Partners whose aim is creating co-operative research and study in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education field, members are;

- Århus Business School
- University of Tartu, The Faculty of Economics and Business Administration
- Kaunas University of Technology Regional Business Incubator
- Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship
- Institute of Business Administration at Tallinn Technical University
- Tampere University, Research Centre for Vocational Education
- Academy of Entrepreneurship and Management, Warsaw

And while there has been a shift is this to say the least enough. The short answer is no. The longer answer is that while there are initiatives on the continent, and they are making an impact the fundemental truth is that the state entrepreneurship lies in societal perception or risk, and the sad truth is that most european societies are risk averse.

The Danish, have a word for being too ambitious, the Spanish say that the best local entrepreneurs take an idea that worked in America and copy it for the local market, the Business Angel activity in many networks sees sometimes at most one deal year. Are these things normal in an society that is pro-entrepreneurial, no, they are counterproductive and act against those of us who are trying to innovate and create enterprise. At the same time, you have a portion of the continent with high national debt, where taxpayer euro’s are going towards intiatives such as government sponsored – socialist designed programmes to create work and lower unemployment, and if we must utilize taxpayer euro’s to create jobs would it not be better if we did it though the creation of new companies?

Then it comes to initiatives, assistance, help, etc… the taxpayer at the end it often paying for European Innovation, which in a way is fine, however, governments at the core of their nature are inefficient due to the lack of a distinctive profit motive, notwithstanding, those individuals in charge of distributing those funds, are they specialists, are they venture cap? No, they are not. And what about EU money dedicated to new enterprise, it’s there but how do you get to it? Information is not only lacking, but the little that does exist requires a PhD in bureaucracy to understand.

Where does this all lead to? Simple, we need to work on changing mindsets while fighting against the grain of society, there is no Silicon Valley (SV) in Europe, there are pockets such as Sophia Antipolis, but as much as the French would like, it’s no SV, but it’s getting there, and this continent if anything needs more initiatives such as Sophia, it needs to embrace new ideas, and put aside its misconceptions of pro-risk behaviour. Only if we do that and work together to foster entrepreneurship on the continent will we truly become a more successful and more efficient society.