Since the coronavirus crisis, more and more people are planning to start an online business and thus get ahead. Some because they have lost their jobs or because they see that their companies will not be able to float, others simply because they aspire to create their own business and not always depend on someone else’s company to get income.
Any of these motivations can be a reason to motivate yourself.
But, How to start an online business without dying in the attempt?
The answer to this question is usually quite simple. That implies that it is worth it to you and that it is worth it to the user who will be your client. If one of these two premises is not met, it is best to find another business idea that is better for you.
If you have an idea that you think is worthwhile, in the sense that you would work on it even if you did not charge for a while and you think it adds value to the user, I will give you the steps that can work for you if they are done correctly, and so on. you can start your business online.
Step by step to start an online business from scratch
The fundamental part of any project to start an online business is to find a profitable business model as soon as possible.
If it takes a long time you run out of money, time, and enthusiasm, that is why it is important to follow a method that allows you to know as soon as possible and without spending all your resources if the idea makes sense or not.
The most recommended method is the Lean startup, which helps you reduce risk when launching a project, focus on a customer segment, find your early adopters, and build a profitable business model as quickly as possible.
Now let’s start with the steps.
# 1: Market analysis and competition
Market analysis is the previous point to know how saturated the market is, against whom you compete, who has something to say in this sector, influencers, strategies, business models, and financial analysis. All this information requires important work from:
Analyze the competition
When starting an online business, the analysis of companies, products, people who are marketing products or services that could attack the same market segment.
Searching for information on the Internet, analyzing social networks, seeing many advertisements and advertisements from other brands … is the way to analyze what they are doing, what type of texts, images and the value proposition they use and thus we can learn a lot before launching our own strategy. ahead.
Analyze business to business and product to product
Likewise, an exhaustive analysis of many brands and products must be done. Analyze the brand structure, image, among others, and all this in detail.
With all this information we have an important starting point of knowledge. It is also very interesting to see if there are people within the team who may be users of the product or service that you are going to offer.
# 2: define the market segment
Once we know how the market is and what solutions are out there, the interesting part of starting an online business arrives; define which market segment you are going to target.
For this, it is advisable to limit the segment as much as possible. That is, choose a segment of customers large enough so that a business can be derived but as small as possible to focus and optimize the marketing budget that we will see later.
# 3: Develop a value proposition to start an online business
Once we are clear about the customer segment we want to target, it is time to develop the value proposition that best fits the problem of our customers.
In this sense, with a defined customer segment, it is much easier to focus on the problem to be solved, to know why it is a problem for them, how they face it and how we can solve it in a better way than what is currently in the market.
The process for designing a value proposition is as follows:
- Define the target customer (early adopter).
- Analyze the objectives of that customer segment.
- Define the actions you take to achieve those goals.
- Write the main problems.
- With this, we propose different solutions.
- We analyze the benefits of those solutions.
- Finally, we choose the value proposition that solves the most important problems and with which the target customer achieves the greatest benefits.
# 4: Define my launch and branding strategy
Once we have defined the target customer, the value proposition and we know the market, we would enter the part of creating the brand and making the product/service known.
