It’s easy to be excited and dream of a perfect business scaling to become an industry leader when beginning a startup. Every entrepreneur dreams of their startup reaching horizons that no other company has before, and although dreaming into the future about your startup being worth a billion dollars is ambitious, it’s also not realistic, at least not in the beginning.
According to Mashable, of the 500,000+ businesses owners that launched companies in 2012, only a handful will ever achieve a fraction of the notoriety of famed CEOs like Zuckerberg, Dorsey or Karp. In no way is that to discourage anyone from building a new startup from scratch but it does encourage entrepreneurs to have appropriate expectations.
So what’s the game plan now? Well, according to Forbes, there are 2 things you should consider.
First off, it’s important to start with a $1,000 investment. Go from small-to-big. This gives you a sense of self-sufficiency and independence. The saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” holds true for investors, as well. Although many startup CEO’s like to chase after funding and revenue, that’s not always the best approach. When you receive funding or investment from a third party, you’re following their dreams and continuing to expand your startup upon their wishes and needs. At that point the question is, would you rather start small and grow big on your merit or do you want to take that hand of help and edit your long term goals.
Second, your $1,000 startup will teach you how to build a real business. The best things in life don’t come easy so when you have no funding, you’ll be forced to learn the ins and outs of a business. Whether it’s creating excel sheets, manually registering customers, learning the back ends of e-commerce, or spending more time than needed on creating ideas, it’s all going to teach you the smallest and most tedious parts of a business. Later on, when the funding does roll around, you’ll have a strategic plan in place regarding how to use that funding, instead of solely depending on it for the success of your business.
At the end of the day, it’s all about what you want and the goals of the company. There are no boundaries in how far a startup can go.