When Is The Best Time To Start A Business?

Is now the best time for you to start a business?

Timing is one of the most important, yet underrated conditions for achieving success in business. You need to go to market at the right time, with enough potential customers to understand and adopt what you do. So what can you do now, to make sure that you can achieve the best timing and put the likelihood of success in your favour? Well listen to this episode of the Startup Stream Serial Entrepreneur Podcast to find out…

Let’s begin…

Start when you know your target audience, have a business plan and a marketing strategy in place

Your customers are everything. They have the last say in whether or not your business will be a success. You need to know who exactly you need to sell to, does your product solve the pain point as efficiently as possible for the end consumer, and can you send your target customer to your website - or wherever it is you intend to sell - as cost effectively as possible. Do you have the very real potential to make a profit? Have you done the maths?

For example, the only purpose a business possesses is the ability to solve a problem. As long as you are sure and convinced, ideally with data, that you can create a good enough product, for a big enough problem, in a cost effective manor, you are ready to start a business.

All too often, new businesses fail because there just isn’t a need for what they’re selling. In fact, it is the main reason why businesses fail. You need to make absolute sure there is a real need for your product otherwise you face an uphill struggle to failure. So get out there, be where your customers are, and get to know them as well as you possibly can.

You know the phrase, “The customer is always right”.

Start a new business when your customers are ready

You need to make sure that your customers are in a position, mentally and physically, to want to adopt your product.

Let’s take YouTube as an example. YouTube was not actually the first ever video sharing platform. In fact, there were a handful of YouTube like platforms before hand, all of which failed. So what made YouTube succeed when others had failed? Timing.

This is because the majority of people before YouTube simply weren’t ready. They weren’t ready to adopt. They didn’t have smart phones, filming home footage was trickier and expensive, there was so much effort involved… But once these barriers to creating content were reduced; with faster internet, mobile devices which can play video on the go and the fact that everyone has a camera in their pocket now, means we as consumers were ready to adopt YouTube.

Now, over 500 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, 1.8 billion users visit YouTube each and every month and YouTube is now the world’s largest search engine, second only to Google. All because of timing.

To emphasise the point, what are some business ideas we are too late to start today? How about designing, creating and selling horse drawn carts en masse? How about selling CDs, Blu-ray or cassettes? There isn’t much need for these now. You would be unlikely to succeed.

On the flip side, what are businesses we are too early to want to start today? How about asteroid mining - although I am aware of some businesses already looking into this. So, how about cyborg robotics or being a planet terraforming expert? You get the idea, we’re just not there yet.

Carrying on…