As entrepreneurs, business owners and marketers, we are obsessed with growth. You must be agile and capable of coming up with intelligent, reasonable solutions that will put you ahead of your competitors.
1. How big is the business opportunity and is it growing?
The first question is how big the business opportunity is and is it growing? To answer this, you need to provide information on the size of the market in which you’re competing and trends affecting the market.
2. What are the financial implications of investing in your company?
How much money are you asking the investor for?
What are you going to do with that money?
What are the projected financial results? For example, what do you expect revenues will be in year one, in year three, in year five? What is expected net income in year one, year three and year five?
3. What is your exit strategy?
Your exit strategy is critical when writing a business plan for investors, since the exit strategy dictates how the investor will ultimately receive payback for their investment and get their money out.
4. Who’s on your management team?
This is key because most investors, or at least the smartest investors, are betting on the management team as much as they’re betting on the market opportunity. You see, even if you have the greatest business idea in the world, if the management team can’t execute on it, then the business will fail.
5. What risk factors have you altready overcome?
Every business has risk factors, and the earlier on in your business, the more risk factors. For example, if you currently have an idea for a new product, the risk factors include,
Whether or not you will be able to design the product
Whether you could cost effectively manufacture the product
Whether consumers/businesses want/will buy the product
Whether you can cost effectively market the product
Whether you could build a quality management team that can execute on the opportunity
6. What are the barriers to entry?
Specifically, once you start growing your company, what is there to prevent others, individuals and companies from stealing your customers?
Part 2 of this series is coming through….
Here’s another humble attempt to showcase India’s ‘Most preferred Startups to work for’, startups that promise a great deal of work, value and learning to the professionals and freshers out there.
1. Ola – Founded in Jan 2011 by IIT Bombay alumni Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Ola is not only India’s most popular mobile app for personal transportation, but also one of the most talked about ‘startups’ from India. Ola has also emerged as the top preferred startup to work for in our survey. The Billion Dollar Unicorn has surely caught the imagination of the young employable population.
2. Zoomcar – At No. 2 is another startup that is solving the problem of urban transportation. This self-drive car rental company raised $11 million from Sequoia Capital, Empire Angels and NGP, a week back.
3. FreeCharge – FreeCharge occupies the third position on the leaderboard. Earlier this year, FreeCharge was acquired by Snapdeal in one of the biggest M&A in the Indian internet ecosystem.
4. Freshdesk – It is encouraging to see a B2B startup occupying the fourth position on this list. Freshdesk is steadily appearing to be one of the best product startups built out of India. Perhaps a testimony to this was its latest $50 Million Series E funding from Tiger Global, Google Capital and Accel.
5. Housing – Unscathed by the myriad controversies surrounding it, Housing still manages to make it to the fifth spot on the ‘Preferred startups to work for’ list. The startup that is known for a ‘fun’ work culture has big bets placed on it by Softbank.
2015 has been a dream run for Indian startups so far. The entrepreneurial spirit is at all time high with over $3.5 billion invested across 380 disclosed deals in the first of half of 2015.
For the first time, Delhi-NCR has overtaken Bengaluru in terms of the number of deals. Of the total amount which has been raised by the startups, majority is being deployed for hiring talent, building technology and scaling up/expansion. Stress on customer acquisition is getting overshadowed by the pressure to hire brighter and smarter talent in a startup.
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