Every week, the five startups from the Grameenphone Accelerator are attending sessions on crucial business topics. Relevant experts and mentors are invited to be guest speakers for these sessions. Last week, the startup teams had the chance to meet Fahim Mashroor, CEO of BDJOBS. During the session, he talked about managing an early-stage startup.
Here are the few key takeaways from the session.
Execution over ideas
Fahim stressed on the importance on the execution part of the business that founders often overlook while starting a startup. He went on to say that BDJOBS was not the first online job site in Bangladesh nor was it unique in the context of the world, but they executed it well, compared to rest of the companies in Bangladesh. So he suggested teams to focus more on execution and think less about perfecting an idea.
All Rounder vs Specialisation
Any CEO should have to have a general understanding of business fundamentals in order to have a good grasp of their new business. One may have to pick up or learn new skills like coding if it’s critical to their business, especially for early-stage founders. With limited resources, the CEO will have to wear many hats in the early stages of running a startup and it will be unwise to delegate these key business responsibilities.
Micro-management vs Supervisory management
It’s obvious that startups make the most mistakes in their early stages. Being involved in the day-to-day operations allows the startup founders to identify a problem far earlier as opposed to learning of a problem through an information chain. Startup founders need to be on top of things to make the right decisions.
Seed capital vs Growth capital
In the early stages, startups should put their own money and their time. The biggest sacrifice will be time, a necessary requirement from the founders. Startups should not wait for investors’ money as the window of opportunity closes fairly quickly in this space. While focusing on bootstrapping, founders may decide to reduce operating costs by hiring talent who are inexpensive and augment the skill gap by putting the additional time in their business. The idea it is to increase the chances of the business to last longer as the road to monetisation or revenue can be difficult in the early stages.
Discipline vs Flair
Winning a competition or award does not guarantee the success of a business. It comes from improving the service or product every day, making it locally relevant and financially sustainable. It is always good to have conservative assumptions about the potential of an idea while starting a business because the market is often difficult to capture and unpredictable in nature.
Marathon vs 100 meter sprint
In Bangladesh, startups need to have a long-term approach because it is difficult to scale business in terms of revenue and valuation; so it is critical to build the business up for long-term success as the Bangladesh economy is still maturing.