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It’s undoubtedly not a surprise that starting a business comes with its fair share of troubles. When you take such a financial and personal risk without any real promise of reward, sometimes things go wrong. What makes a successful small business is the entrepreneur who took a difficulty or failure and learned from it.
Everyone loves a good underdog story. And when it comes to small businesses trying to make their way in the world of large corporations – most of those businesses have a pretty good underdog story to tell the people who care to listen. Every startup has its fair share of hiccups – some more serious than others. But there’s nothing quite as incredible as the story of a startup that overcame their problems and came back even stronger from it.
Burn Victims Resource
This website and library of knowledge was originally designed to help keep people who have been the victims of serious burns gain access to medical and legal knowledge they might not else have. Burn Victims Resource has everything you need to know about being burned – from statistics about types of burns, to advice on when you should see a doctor after being burned, all the way to when you should consider getting a lawyer, and how to go about finding one.
When the team first put together the website and got it active, they ran into a simple, but big problem: how do they reach their audience? Medical professionals have no need for such information, and likewise lawyers don’t, so there was no need to market the information there. But, yet, those sources could provide a useful outlet to getting people to find their site.
So that’s where they started – they promoted their library of information to professionals who could then spread the word to the people who might need it. They were also strategic as they designed their websites to be picked up in search engines – they ensured that people who were typing symptoms into a search engine would run across their page, and find all the medical and legal knowledge they might need going forward.
Their strategic marketing paid off, and they found that traffic to their library of information increased as more and more people found it and used it.
Aqua Yield
Designed to help farmers reduce their phosphorus and water use, Aqua Yield is a process that is designed to reduce the use of fertilizer in farming. Using their purifying technique, they strip the water of impurities, which is designed to help the plants absorb the nutrients easier. This results in farmers using less water – as it is absorbed easier – and little to no fertilizer other than what is used in Aqua Yield.
One of the most challenging things the founders of Aqua Yield faced was trying to break into such a stagnant industry. The fertilizer and farming community is set in its ways, and has been for a long time. Regardless of the fact that the industry needs change in order to preserve the environment, and that these actions should be aggressive, the industry is highly skeptical of new technology.
Despite the fact that Aqua Yield’s process and technology can help save water and phosphorous in farming, they had a hard time buying into the agriculture industry. It took a long time for them to find the right investors, not to mention people who were willing to promote their process and technology to the industry.
As they began to find the right people to invest in their process and spread the word, they found it easier and easier to get support in the industry. They’re still constantly working to market their process and get new farmers behind them, but they’ve now gained the traction they need to start making a difference in the industry.
Manetch
This platform is designed as a networking service for businesses big and small to make professional connections. The way Manetch works is by having the representatives of businesses and entrepreneurs taking brief, professional surveys about their business. From there, the service matches those businesses with other out there that may be similar or run in the same markets. This helps entrepreneurs to form connections with other businesses that they may never have had the opportunity to before.
When the platform was first created and the founders were working toward launch, they ran across a problem that many growing startups face: they had too much work to do, and too few people to do it. They found that a good amount of their work went undone because they couldn’t get around to doing it themselves, so they knew they needed to hire some new people to help them. But they also had a shoestring budget. So how could they hire new people to a startup without offering an attractive package of pay and perks?
Like in most startups, Manetch found that creating the right team is a matter of finding motivated and talented people who are invested enough in your product or service that they’re willing to work for less than they usually might. This isn’t always easy – and a lot of the time it still leaves the founders with the heavy end of the workload. But as their business grew and became more stable, they were able to bring on more and more experts to their team to make their business a success.
Harmonia
A service designed to help keep teams organized, Harmonia is widely utilized to help delegate tasks. Both professionally and personally, this tool is useful, as it not only reminds you to complete tasks that have been assigned and tells you when to do them – it will also delegate the tasks to specific people on the team. As weeks pass, Harmonia ensures that the tasks are delegated fairly between every member of the team. No more playing favorites!
When first started, the small business team found it hard to keep themselves motivated, and keep their end goal in mind. When you’re in the trenches of starting a business, and dealing with the nitty-gritty of finances and legality, it can be hard to remember why exactly it is you started.
Rather than lose their momentum, the team decided to reach out to the people around them for inspiration. Whether it was friends, family, neighbors, or investors – they found people who weren’t a part of the effort to start the company, but still knew about it. These people – outside of the actual effort of starting the business – reminded them about the excitement of their service, and why they’d started in the first place.
It helps for entrepreneurs to keep their perspective when first starting their business. Whether that’s having friends and family tell you what they’re excited about, or writing down your own thoughts and periodically re-reading them – anything will help you as you continue your journey.
April 28, 2017 at 03:53AM
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