The First Step To Any Business Venture

They say stories is what people like to hear, so here’s a story for you:

I had a T-Shirt one day with a specific slogan. Every time I wore it, people would say “Cool Tshirt” / “Love it” etc… EVERY TIME! That Tshirt was really old, probably 5-6 years old and by then, the retailer had stopped selling the Tshirt, and the versions I found where just completely ugly. So I was thinking “people love my Tshirt, I can’t buy it anymore anywhere, therefore I should build it!”.

Made sense at the time. My proof of demand was all the compliments I had. I was a web developer so I just had to whip out a quick website and for pricing I would just charge the standard price for a Tshirt. I then did some math, figured if I screen printed myself I would save some money. Bought some material to screen print myself, found what Tshirt brand I wanted to use to print on, worked on setting up our social media accounts, etc… In the end I was 6 months in, we launched and sold 3 Tshirts! Over 1 year. I must say after another 3 months I gave up on that already.

Looking back I figured the way we approached the market was completely wrong. We did not identify the market properly and then could not market accurately. After some more research, I even discovered I could have learned all of that in just one day! I could have set up a Teespring page, whip some quick designs on photoshop, and then setup some facebook ads targetted at different audiences and then see the ROI!

The reason I’m saying all this is because, from my experience and all of my research, the first step to any business venture should be research! Research will save you so much time, make you discover so many things about your industry, your customers and what your focus should be. You CANNOT afford not to research long and hard your industry.

Don’t know where to start? The first and best step would be to work on your Business Plan. Not because you’ll need it to get investors later down the road (although you will), it will be out-dated before then. The reason I still recommend it is because it will force you to formulate and research your business which will save you so much hassle and bring you clarity. A great resource would be this guide from Inc.com. I’ve added the links to all of their articles for that series. Enjoy!

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