By Jerry Liu

Nowadays, a lot of young people are planning to create their own startups. There are definitely pros and cons in terms of starting your own business. According to The PMARCA Guide to Startups, the great things about doing a startup are having the opportunity to control everything by yourself, create something new, have an impact on the world, and create your ideal culture and work with a dream team of people.

On the other side of the story, which many people may ignore, you have to embrace a
bunch of hardships and difficulties. During the initial phase of a startup, there will be so much uncertainty and risk thus being emotionally strong is the key to survive. At the same time, you may face many disagreements and doubts from different kinds of people so being confident and consistently trusting yourself is really vital to deal with all the negativity.

So what matters for the success of startups? This is a main question that nearly every entrepreneur will ask themselves. Team, product, market are three key factors. As we mentioned before, when thinking about getting startup ideas, you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. It means finding a correct market with specific target audiences who have special needs is the starting point for most of the startups. Microsoft and Facebook used the second way which is narrowing down to a specific group of people with a particular need to start up their business and then expand the market to target different groups of people who have the same kind of desire. In a word, a product should look for a market with lots of real potential customers so that the market will finally pull the product out of the startup.

As we can see, the key for a successful startup is getting to product/market fit which means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. So figuring out what problems the product can solve and does solving the problems really matter to the market, is critical. If the answer is yes, then the product could be a good startup idea for the particular market.

In conclusion, as a startup founder, always get ready to encounter challenges and emotional fluctuations and be persistently consistent whether you’re facing approval or disagreement during the whole process. More importantly, we should pay enough attention to product/market fit by the meantime of building a strong team to create a quality product.