Starting a business is never easy. When you have decided to start a business or set up your own business, you will definitely have to accept the risks and challenges that come with it.

Source: Startup Wonders

Most startups cannot "survive" through the second year, the reason is not only financial resources, but also the more important human factor.
According to startup experts, the reason startups do not overcome the harsh challenges in the entrepreneurial journey and are forced to be "game over" is because they are not prepared to accept the challenges.

Mistakes that engulf your Startup!

You have a business idea, you decide to jump out and start a business with enthusiasm to succeed. Holding the business registration certificate in hand, you are already a business owner.
The early days of starting a business are probably the most passionate times of your life. The whole company discussed the business plan, everyone confidently waited for the day to get the sweet fruit. How can it fail, such a good business idea.
But then starting to work, you will see that the cost on paper is completely different from the actual cost. Pouring a lot of money but the sales are flat. The source of money is not abundant, so the plan made is likely to fail due to interrupted cash flow. It turns out that it is not enough to start a business with a good idea, you also have to understand finance, cash flow management...
Then everyone in the new business has a lot of work, the assignment is not clear, small and big things are discussed, but can't get a final solution.

Source: Take It Personel-ly

Imagine recruiting employees to the company, they will do the work for the owner. Turns out, the owner work for employees. Retaining employees is also one of the "pains" of start-ups. Again, the lesson that aside from being good at business and being good at finance, you also need to know the knowledge of Business Operation: Communication - Marketing - Sales - Media - Human Resources.
Difficulties pile up, and one day, your fledgling business will not have time to blow out the candles to welcome the second birthday.
Like every business in the economy, Startup also suffered heavy impacts from the Covid-19 epidemic.
The main reason leading to the failure of Startups is: Due to lack of knowledge, no systematic. Or due to overconfidence in their own ability, market potential... leading to not listening, not changing. As a result, they went in the wrong direction, and when they turned back, the others were already gone.
However, despite the fact that many businesses had to close, the number of newly registered enterprises with large capital increased sharply. That shows the great potential of this field. And certainly the market always has many opportunities if the Startup has enough knowledge and skills to operate the business.

Why is it difficult for many startups to have a "second birthday"?

As a very famous CEO person in the startup field once mentioned, in the world, the platform connecting freelancers (freelancers) and businesses has been around for more than 10 years. But in somewhere, this model is completely new and many people don't even know what a freelancer is. Therefore, the CEO faces difficulties because when talking about freelancers, customers do not understand. And to build a website that suits the needs of freelancers is also very difficult because there are very few “professional” freelancers in the labor market to learn.
At that time, according to the CEO, she built a platform completely like the famous websites in the world and failed. Because in the world, when a business chooses a freelancer, they will pay through the platform and that platform will collect a transaction fee. But in her country at that time, consumers did not like to pay fees to third parties.
“For example, when buying and selling a house, if I have to go through a third party, who would be okay with that? Therefore, I had to build a new model whereby the platform would collect fees first instead of waiting for businesses and freelancers to complete the transaction and then collect fees. Building a new platform takes a lot of time and this is a painful lesson when starting a business without understanding the market needs," the CEO said

Source: INTHEBLACK

According to the CEO, for a startup, the pain is how to compete with the products of strong businesses when financial resources are limited. And the experience that this CEO gives is to take advantage of community activities.
“When I started my business, I built a community of freelancers on facebook and held periodic events, sharing skills, experiences… to increase my working skills and increase the possibility of freelancers being able to find regular customers, solve problems freelancers face. After about 2 years, the freelancer community has developed very strongly and is very engaged. After that, I built ta freelancer platform and moved this community over and so far this community has been very attached,” shared the CEO.
Many experts and startups themselves also said that the big difficulty for startups is the human factor. It is a question of whether to hire good people to make the startup easier to succeed or to recruit new personnel to "slowly" train? Retaining personnel is also one of the "pains" of start-ups, especially in the technology field. The situation that large enterprises attract employees from small businesses, small businesses attract employees from newly established businesses... is quite common, especially in the context that startups face many difficulties in terms of products, market, while financial conditions are limited, it is difficult to keep good personnel.

How to overcome the "pain" of a startup?

When you decide to hire high-quality personnel, you must determine whether the target in 6 months will help the business results to grow or not, and how the growth target will be achieved.
“Remember that high-quality personnel costs a lot. Why are banks willing to pay the CEO a lot but only pay the average employee a small salary per month? And if recruiting normal personnel, it will certainly not be effective immediately. Therefore, according to his own experience, high-quality personnel is not necessarily good, but startups need to find suitable personnel. It is suitable for: environment, corporate culture and each period of time…”
For most startups, especially startups in the technology field, first of all, there must be a product that meets the needs of the user and the user will feel that the product is useful for themselves. themselves, then have to find a way to introduce the product to the market so that more people know about that product, which is the marketing angle. However, when customers already know the product, the next headache is whether they pay or not to exploit sales on that product. Finally, when there is a good product, there are many users, another headache is how to get investors to find the product and offer to invest.

Source: The Economic Times

So how to prepare well for "startup" projects before investors? In order to create good products to satisfy consumers, it is necessary to understand what consumers want. To understand, it is imperative that startups do marketing research (market research), although it is small, but helps startups understand the wishes of customers.
It is better to build a community for yourself, from which to have feedback on the product such as whether the product is good or not, has anything special, makes customers happy or not. satisfied; What needs to be improved…
Finally, need to market your products, currently online marketing is an effective and relatively inexpensive channel for small startups. So researching online marketing with small startups is not easy but not too difficult to conquer.
“Getting a customer to buy a product from us is already difficult, but how to get the customer to come back is more difficult. Therefore, startups should take steps to prepare so that when customers come back to buy and are ready to recommend the product to friends and relatives, then we have been half successful. Finally, to be ready so that when meeting investors, startups must prepare impressive tools, tools, and presentations to introduce their products to them.