Startup Founder Advice: 10 Must-Know Pro Tips for Young Entrepreneurs

I have been working in the marketing and design industry for over 8 years and have founded 2 companies myself. Let me give you 10 absolute pro tips to help you succeed on your startup journey - quick and easy.

→ Practical tips to tackle the common startup hurdles
→ Insights into creating a solid base for long-term success

Let's dive in!

This is the most important tip of all. Validate your business  idea. Validating your idea means that before you invest time and money into development or marketing, you want to get proof that people actually find your solution valuable AND are willing to pay for it.

So go to your target audience, find out their pain points, and see if your solution solves their problem. If they say yes, you continue. If they say no, you reassess and refine your idea.

If you don't know who your customers are, you'll use the wrong messaging, the wrong marketing channels and even the wrong pricing strategy. In the end, you will not get any customers. So understanding your target audience - your Personas - is absolutely critical.

When you define your Personas, make sure you use a proven template - like mine - and always focus on 3 key points:

• What frustrates your Personas?
• What motivates them to solve their problem?
• What does success look like to them?

Once you understand these 3 key points, you will have a good understanding of who your customers are.

If you want to sell your products online, you need a powerful lead magnet funnel. The reason is this: If you show your offer to 100 people, 97% of them will not buy. Either they are not interested at all or they are not ready to buy.

A lead magnet funnel solves this problem. It works like this: You offer something valuable on your website that people can download for free - in exchange for their email address.

Popular lead magnets are ebooks, worksheets and checklists.

And once you have people's email addresses, you send them regular, valuable content - for example, more free checklists, a free demo of your service and so on - you nurture them with more valuable content until these leads trust you and are ready to buy from you.

There are 19 marketing channels you could choose to market your service. But most of them will not give you results. So you need to focus on the ones that work best for your business. And you can do this by experimenting with different marketing channels.

An excellent framework for this is the Bullseye Framework - you basically brainstorm different marketing ideas and different channels, move the best ideas to the middle ring - do quick tests and focus on the best performers.

This will help you focus on the channels that will give you a real return and not waste money on inefficient marketing.

One of the most common misconceptions in business is that it is all about customer acquisition. Customer acquisition is important - true - but if you really want your business to grow, customer retention is even more important.

Imagine this: this is your business, this bucket.

Now, at the top, you pour in some water, your customers. If you have small holes, the water will run out - slowly but steadily.

But if you have big holes, the bucket will be empty before you can add any more water.

On the other hand, if you have no holes, the water will get more and more.

I like this metaphor because it illustrates the importance of customer retention. Getting new customers is great, but keeping your customers is even more important.

The startup valley of death is the time when you're already in business, but you don't have any customers, so you're not making any revenue.

Check out this graph:

This is the valley of death curve. On the y-axis you have cash and on the x-axis you have time. As a startup, you start with a pool of money - from investors or your own. cash. But there's a catch - you've just started your business, you don't have any customers - so you don't have any revenue.

So every week and every month you burn through your cash. That's the steep downward slope on your graph - the valley.

So what's the goal, you ask?

Your goal is to get to the other side of the valley - the upward slope. This is where you finally start making sales and your cash flow becomes positive. The startup valley of death is one of the main reasons why most startups fail. So get out of it as soon as possible.

Keeping your customers is the key to a successful business. And the AHA Moment is crucial for this. The AHA Moment determines whether people stay with your service or leave. It's the point where users realize how your product can solve their pain point. It's the point where they say, "Oh wow, this is exactly what I've been looking for".

So get customers to the AHA moment as quickly as possible. If customers experience that moment early on, they will stay with you. If they never experience it, they will leave.

There are over 50 metrics you can measure in your startup journey, but most of them are irrelevant to success. You need to focus on the right ones.

The right ones are - in most cases - revenue-generating metrics - this could be monthly recurring revenue, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value or average order size.

They all affect your revenue - so your goal is to constantly improve these metrics. What you should not do is focus on your website traffic, social media likes, shares and comments. Yes, they are relevant to your marketing efforts, but they are vanity metrics.

1 million likes on your social media post might seem cool, but if they don't generate revenue, they're worthless. So focus on the metrics that really matter to your success.

Customer feedback is one of the building blocks of any successful business. Not getting regular customer feedback is like crossing the street without looking left or right. Just not a good idea. You are essentially running in the dark, gambling that customers like what you are doing.

But that's the wrong approach.

It is always better to ask customers what they need to be successful and how your product can help them. Then you build exactly that. Customers will see that you value what they have to say and will stay with you longer.

This is my personal favorite - keep learning, keep improving. 10 years ago I was thinking about building my own business and looking back on the journey I have come a long way. I am not at the end yet - but what I am trying to say is this - it is the process that makes the journey fun - looking back and seeing that you have grown, learned a new skill or met new people - that is what it is all about.

So keep pushing yourself, keep learning, keep improving.

These are my top 10 advice for startup founders. But we are not done yet - in fact, if you want to build a successful startup, there is a lot you need to do right. How about a step by step guide? A proven system - full of worksheets, cheat sheets and templates to guide you to business success?

Check out my Startup Success Bundle.

You will learn everything you need to know to  build the thriving, successful business of your dreams.