How to Start a Business with Zero Experience & No Contacts?

Many businesses are set up every day in India, ranging from small tea stalls to large companies. They rely on good marketing plans and networking for their initial success. The chances are that the businesses that you are trying to start are already present in the market. And hence contacts and network are what separates you here from your competition. Many business owners take the help of networking and mouth-to-mouth publicity to grow big.

For example, when you look at Zerodha, you can find that they went big due to their quality and by relying on the networking which was done by them. Links and relationship building is the difference between a growing company and a stagnant company. In this blog, we will tell you about starting a business with no experience. If you are a new entrepreneur ready to dive into the ocean, then you can use some of these tips to become the shark of the ocean.

Some business that started without experience but went on to become successful are given below:

• PayTM by Vijay Shekhar Sharma
• Cred by Kunal Shah
• OYO by Ritesh Agrawal

1. Frame a Business and Marketing Plan

The first step is the conception of ‘IDEA’, which plays a central role in starting any business. If you have an idea and think that it is good enough to crack the market, then the next step is to create a good business and marketing plan.

It is the step where you finally get the answer to ‘how to start your own business’ realistically. A business plan intends to create a moving plan for your team to start getting revenues. Simultaneously you also need a marketing plan, as there are more competitors in the market than you can imagine.

Many people like you are trying to build businesses with an idea similar to yours. To step ahead of the competition, a good marketing plan (something that brings you popularity or revenues as planned) is required with the right marketing people like writers, marketers, social media marketers, community building people, and more on your side. Remember that there can only be one ‘Amazon’ in the market, but the thing is that everyone can try to be that ‘Amazon’.

2. Setting up a Support Network

With the finalisation of the business and marketing plan, you will need many allied services in your business. These are the essential services that will take care that your core business idea thrives well. Some of these are the financial team, HR team, sales team, legal team, supply & manufacturing team, and more.

Many of these domains can be handled by a single person too. However, it is a great idea to divide the work and focus on one domain with perfection rather than being a jack of all trades.

To ease this process, you can hire a manager or a product management specialist who will build a seamless collaboration within each department. You can set up a CRM and manage it yourself in the early days. As the scale grows, hire a professional to look for these nuisances while you check the core business chain.

3. Build and Participate in a Business Community

Business community participation is a significant step in deriving new processes and leads. And surprisingly, it is also one of the most ignored aspects with people starting new businesses. Join a local or domestic business community and participate in the events/communications. It helps you in growing your network and may also help in finding potential leads.

If not for leads, then you can participate in the community for sharing and gaining new information. Many people have ideas of optimising any process, and they tend to share it with people on these community platforms. Grab it as who knows it can work for you, and you have a perfect answer for this: How to start a business with no experience?

4. Understand your industry competitors

To get above your competition, you need to make sure that you know all the necessary things about your competition. Your competition is the motivation that forces you to do better in the market.

If your competitors are above you, you need to focus on checking their supply chain, product details and pricing, and other miscellaneous details. Behind any business, there are a lot of things running that fuel that business.

Once you know this information, the next part is to optimise and minimise the resources required to produce quality products. Checking the market is also necessary as it will govern your demand-supply chain. For example, India is considered a price-sensitive market. The people here are reluctant to buy products that are priced heavily if there are alternatives available.

Hence, for these types of markets, price is a governing factor. People are more willing to compromise on product quality rather than high pricing. Hence you need to make sure that pricing is given importance in manufacturing while maintaining the quality. For this same reason, Xiaomi, Oppo, Redmi, and many Chinese brands are more prevalent than the other global/ Indian brands.

5. Get Digital Presence

If you are in the primary/secondary sector, there is no need for a digital presence. But suppose your business comes under the tertiary sector. In that case, you need to go digital with an all-time high population running on the digital world. Many unicorn companies have one thing in common: their huge digital presence and digital business process.

With more and more population coming online and spending a significant part of the day in the online business, you have an option to leverage this huge customer base and convert them into your revenue source. Hire the best web developers, designers, SEO experts, and writers and manoeuvre your business digitally. Digital marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods that generate high ROI.

6. Test, Test, Test

With all things set up and you ready to explore the ocean, it’s about time to get started. To make the expectations clear, be ready to face loss multiple times but get back up. You need to test your market and continuously test the market regarding how well it responds to your products.

It is one of the best tips to start a business, and you should follow it well. Target the consumers, release the products, services to them, test the response, change the strategies, optimise the products, and then again roll it back to the customers. It is a never-ending process as the customers will adapt and evolve, and so would your product.

There may be many faults and unnecessary features in your products, which most stakeholders will not use. For them, you will need to refurbish your product with new alterations and then release it back into the market. With the tough competition going in the market, the businesses that can adapt and change quickly will survive in the long run.

Also read:

1) Best Tips for Customer Retention for a Small Business
2) Tips to Understand Your Market while Starting a Small Business
3) Tips for Businesses to Overcome the Covid Blues - Revival Tips for Businesses
4) What are the keys to success when operating a small scale business?
5) OkCredit: All you need to know about OkCredit & how it works.

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FAQs

Q. Can I start a small business with no money?

Ans. It is definitely possible to start your own business even when you don’t have sufficient money at the start. You need to have a good idea that can drive revenues and get it validated by business experts available online. Then for financing, you can check for loans or investors who are willing to put money in your idea.

Q. Is change good for my business?

Ans. Changing things organically is good for your business as, with time, the market evolves and new requirements are created. For example, with huge digitalisation during 2010-2020, we felt the need for many digital products to simplify our living like payments, booking vehicles, and more.

Q. How to form a team for the business?

Ans. Building a team is one of the most crucial factors in starting any business, as you will work with them for the foreseeable future. You can get started by first hiring freelancers and then converting them full-time.