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Creating and developing a startup is a challenging endeavor, despite the available support, as it requires convincing various stakeholders with different motivations: investors, clients, partners, and future team members. This article emphasizes the importance of collaboration and seeking compatible associates to share and evolve the project’s vision. It’s crucial to convince not only associates and initial clients but also one’s own family of the entrepreneurial opportunity despite the inherent risks. This involves reassuring them by demonstrating the value of the company and the skills mobilized to achieve the goals.
E. Krieger
Creating and growing a startup almost always involves an uphill battle, even though many resources now facilitate the entrepreneurial journey. You’ll need to convince a wide range of stakeholders who won’t be swayed by the same arguments. A potential investor will think differently from a client, a potential partner, or a future recruit.
Entrepreneurship is often a team sport. To move from an initial idea to a concrete project, it’s often necessary to share your vision with people who complement your skills and temperament. You’ll need to find associates who can share and redesign your project as well as its underlying vision.
Convincing associates, initial clients… and even your own family!
While forming a core team of founders, you also need to find clients to validate your offering and ideally, pre-fund its development. This is where the difference often lies between two companies with comparable technical advantages. The ability to identify and convince initial clients makes the difference. This will be easier if you’ve segmented the market based on the intensity of needs, following the methods of my colleague Frédéric Iselin, who summarized his thesis in a provocatively titled book: « Entrepreneurs, managers: are you selling at the highest possible price?«
Your value proposition will be clearer when you can show your future clients what they will be able to achieve with your offering. For example, saving time or making substantial cost savings.
When deciding to embark on the entrepreneurial adventure, you generally also need to convince your spouse and loved ones of the opportunity to start and take on the risks inherent in such a project. Many entrepreneurs recount their first negotiation with family members who don’t always understand the benefits of giving up the (relative) comfort of traditional employment.
Attracting the best investors and mobilizing talent
One characteristic of bubble periods is that money flows generously… but not to the extent of funding just any project. You’ll need to convince investors that you’re not only going to change the world but also generate significant cash flows and, ultimately, substantial returns for those who took the risk to fund you at a very early stage. Not all investors are equal, by any means: you’ll need to be able to persuade those who can genuinely help you grow and cross critical thresholds.
The list of stakeholders to whom you’ll need to sell your business project is extensive: incubators, public or private funders, industrial or commercial partners, experts and advisors of all kinds who can help you make significant progress.
A critical mass of capital… and credibility!
Once you’ve gathered a critical mass of capital, contracts, and/or public funding, you can finally expand your team with employees eager to join the entrepreneurial adventure without risking going unpaid.
This perspective is corroborated by venture capital professionals, who consider that the quality of the team is the best guarantee of a startup’s success.
In his book « On m’avait dit que c’était impossible » (They Told Me It Was Impossible), Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, co-founder of Criteo and president of the think-tank The Galion Project, perfectly sums up the necessity of mobilizing the best profiles for your project: « Seduction is the key in the startup’s early stages. At this point, the entire dynamic relies on a shoestring. Everything you do (business plan, pre-financing, product prototype, and sometimes even client tests) ultimately has only one goal: to convince the right talents to join you. »
From this standpoint, formulating a clear, ambitious development plan, preferably validated by initial commercial successes, is merely a consequence of an entrepreneur’s art of bringing talents together to move mountains.
Thus, an entrepreneur is primarily a leader who manages to mobilize talents to transform a vision into a company that is not only prosperous but also creates non-strictly financial value.
