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!.

Cut and dry, if you can’t tell me what your entrepreneurial project does in a sentence, you’ve got a problem.

I can’t begin to tell you how common a mistake it is among budding entrepreneurs to delve into the mundane details of their projects. It usually starts off like this.

“We at New Mobile Platforms Ltd. have developed a revolutionary platform that will change the way in which people communicate. By utilizing free wifi access across major urban areas we were able to relay signals and triangulate the locations of other individuals using the same application on their mobile devices, thus pinpointing the users location to 2.3m. Other users and subscribers to friend’s devices, can see other users via real time database query’s that are updated on their mobile devices from street to our data centre and their handset every 15 seconds via, GPRS, EDGE and G3 network connections, as well as free Wifi hotspots. If you look at our programming schematic, you will see that etc… etc… etc…”

Long story short, to most investors, individuals, and to the general public you might as well be speaking Ancient Greek. The majority of the population are not engineers, do not know industry jargon, and most importantly are not interested in detailed programming schematics. What it is that they are interested in is how the product will help them in the course of their day to day lives and what need it satisfies, and when dealing with investors, they’d also like to know how it makes money.

So let’s take the above example, and rephrase it into something that can be pitched in an elevator setting.

“We’ve developed a mobile app that lets you know where your friends are on a map. It’s great for trying to meet up with people and can help you navigate unknown areas, find meetings, and the like. We monetize via Mobile Advertising.”

And that’s it. No long elaborate explanations, no technical details, just what we do, what it offers, and how we plan to make money off of it. Now whether or not this idea is a good one, is a different story all together, but being able to summarize what it does in a sentence is the most important part of any elevator pitch. You get your message across clearly, effectively and quickly.

To summarize.

• Stay away from lengthy explanations that can be confusing.
• Cut away all industry jargon.
• Get to the point and keep it simple.
• Say what you do, how it fulfills a need, and how you monetize it.