USA: startup’s Promised Land, fertile soil for entrepreneurship and creativity to grow. Young European businessmen often long for American startup culture, and take a trip across the ocean to find happiness (and investors) in Silicon Valley. Why they fail? Why great ideas, creative solutions and innovative projects don’t evolve into big business players on global market? Polish businessman and consultant Arkadiusz Skuza identified 10 fatal mistakes European startups make.
- Going to USA as if you were going to a ZOO: you make a trip to search for investors with nothing but your idea. Who do you want to meet? What do you know about them? What can you offer? Without detailed schedule backed up by thorough research, all you do is improvised sightseeing.
- Lack of preparation. Before approaching an investor, KPIs, aims, business plan and estimated budget must be ready. Such meetings require a lot of groundwork: analysis, research, formulating documents, which often entails costs (e.g. hiring a consultant).
- Underestimating others. Other people, like those who faced and solved problems similar to yours, are crucial for development of your business. Benefit from their expertise, but don’t treat their knowledge as something you can take for free. Pay for it! Buy your interlocutor a coffee or invite for lunch. Hire consulting company.
- Delaying going public. Testing, confronting your idea with others (with recipients – people for whom you created the product) provide more insights than any other stage of work. Entrepreneurs tend to demonize that stage in fear of customers’ criticism, friends’ jibes and investors’ disappointment. Under the cloth of perfectionism we hide anxiety, while feedback from real users allows you to create a good product. Great solutions don’t come from epiphany, but from interactions with real audience, tests, and reviews.
- Thinking „I’m not a salesperson!” Some entrepreneurs tell themselves „I’m not a salesperson, I’m not a marketer, I don’t sell, I’ll hire specialists do it when I money arrives”. Sadly, that myth needs immediate busting. Actually, you do sell – you have to make partners buy your idea, what requires salesperson mindset. It can be learned.
- Grumbling about public funding. Skuza stresses that American tradition of money-raising (focused on private money) differs from European model (with more public programs for entrepreneurs). Respect that diversity and be like a ninja, using everything at hand to achieve success and use public money in smart way, combining it with private funding.
- Fear: thousands of businesses fail due to unconscious anxiety of the new, of change, of confrontation. Often prolonged work on details becomes nothing more than a mask of fear.
- Mistaking innovation for profit. Entrepreneur’s main concern is innovation or novelty, but profit. Beginners tend to equate quality of project itself and its commercial value, what leads to serious oversights (e.g. by price-shaping process).
- Not knowing your worth. Act as if you were to sell your company today. To whom and why could you sell it? What precisely is your value: patent? Exclusive access to resource? Team?
- Getting discouraged by failing: success comes from determination, ability to handle refusal and obstacles. Criticism, when not taken personally, offers a lot of information and sometimes even support.
Have clear vision, do research, and be brave and prepared!
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