startup strategy Quotes

When you are starting to run an online business, you need to narrow down a niche market and be able to stick with it until you have a good profit coming in. This can take a while, so you need to have a great deal of patience to make sure that your business is moving in the right direction.

If you are planning to start a business, and if you want that business to have a hope of succeeding, be sure you are approaching your venture from a true Entrepreneurial Perspective.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

Founders should think of their company as a product and build it and shape it with the same passion and care.

If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.

For a startup, you need to stay small so the others don't attack, or you aim to be one of the big guys. If you don't do it right, you might lose everything.

When I was starting out, I thought about how the Internet is global and that we should have a global name, a name that's interesting. At that time, the best name was Yahoo! Suddenly I thought, 'Alibaba is a good name.'

You intentionally start small, because you will not be able to compete with an incumbent... because the incumbent is always going to go for the full solution.

A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.

Essentials of how to do a startup do not include writing a business plan

When I started my company in the U.S. I was always told by my mentors, 'If you want to start a tech company, you need a technical co-founder,' because outsourcing just doesn't work. It is too slow, it is too expensive, and the product is going to change a lot.

Founders go wrong when they start to believe their business plan will materialize as written. I advise entrepreneurs to burn their business plan - it's simply too dangerous to the health of your business.

Young entrepreneurs should spend an awful lot of time thinking about what they want to go into.

So always keep momentum, it's this prime directive for managing a startup.

Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.

Nine out of ten businesses fail; so I came up with a foolproof plan - create ten businesses.

Long term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. This is a huge advantage if you do it.

Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.

There's nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated.

From the first days of my career as an entrepreneur, I have always used my own and my team's lack of experience to our advantage. In fact, at our first venture, Student magazine, we used our newcomer status to secure great interviews and generate publicity - people were excited about our new project and wanted to get involved. Our inexperience fed our restless enthusiasm for trying new things, which became part of our core mission.

Never expect that your startup can cover every aspect of the market. The key is knowing what segment will respond to your unique offering. Who your product appeals to is just as important as the product itself.

It's often lost in most Silicon Valley startups, the importance of storytelling when most people are thinking about they assemble their team and the critical functions that the team needs to be successful. Storytelling is normally not on the list.

We now understand the distinction between startups - who search for a business model - versus existing companies - that execute a business plan.

If you think you have a good idea, get into the marketplace as quickly as you can, using as little money as possible, and see what happens.