The Unfair Advantage: Part 2 - The Startup Quick Start Guide

 

The Startup Quick Start Guide

This is a continuation from part 1 and I will go over the some of the things I picked from the startup quick start guide in the book. Hopefully, you can follow the steps in order to start your business.

1.) The Why

We all have a higher self and a lower self, and the best way to align your motivations fully is if there’s something in it for you for your ‘lower self’ (trying to live a certain lifestyle, getting the recognition, the money, the status, the freedom), and for your ‘higher self’, which is hopefully much bigger in scope (helping others, spreading opportunity, pulling people out of poverty, saving lives, saving the environment, giving people access to a good education). - Ash , pg 142

You must have a great reason to start your business because it is hard and it will reach a point you will feel like giving up. However, if the reason you are starting the business is strong enough, you can pull through. 

2.) The Type of Startup

Lifestyle Startup

Lifestyle startups (or lifestyle businesses) are so called because they are designed to sustain a certain lifestyle. That could be a certain income, a certain work schedule, or it could be that there’s a constraint placed on their growth ‒ whether by the founders’ design or by the local or niche nature of their market. -pg 145

Hypergrowth Startups

Hyper-growth startups are better if you’re very strong on unfair advantages. Lifestyle startups are better if your unfair advantages are not so developed.

These are startups that are rooted in technology and scale up very fast e.g Uber , AirBnb etc.

3.) The Idea

You get a great idea by having both a key insight into a problem, and then coming up with a great solution to that problem. This solution is your product. The process by which you get there is a combination of critical and creative thinking, and this often comes from your long-term problem solving either in a theoretical context (Education advantage) or a practical one (Expertise advantage).

When coming up with an idea, think of who you are trying to help solve their problems. Will your business help them in any way? Another way of coming up with a business idea is to solve your own problems. This is great because you have the necessary insight and you understand the problem in and out. More often than not, you are not the only person facing that problem and if you come up with a great solution, you can capitalize on it.

You should also pick ideas that suit your unfair advantages. Ideas that complement you as a person and not the opposite. For example, if you start a gaming business and you are a non gamer, it will eventually fail as you do not have the key insight that makes gamers want to play games

4.) The People

Finding and selecting the right co-founders to turn your idea into a successful startup is one of the most powerful applications of the MILES Framework. What you need to be asking yourself is: Where am I weakest? Which of the unfair advantages do I have the least leverage in?

It is better to start a business as a team than going about it solo. This will make it a bit easier to deal with all the challenges that come with a start up. There are essentially three roles that must be fulfilled for the startup to even have a chance of success.

a.) The creator

This is vision bearer who sees how the business will eventually be and how it will make an impact on the world

b.) The communicator

This is the person who sells the product to customers and make sure there is good customer relations with user

c.) The technician

This is the person who actually builds the products and makes sure it works as expected

5.) The Business

Before you begin fundraising for your business, you must validate your idea. The way to do this is build a MVP(Minimum Viable Product) and put it out on the market to see whether there is actual demand for it. If there is, good for you and you can incorporate the feedback you get from customers to making the business even better. If there is no demand, you can scrap it off and look for another idea.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. I hope you found value in this review. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please let me know in the comment section.