Today, you may try to ignore new technology in your personal life but that’s not an option in business. If you want your startup to succeed in today’s technology-driven business environment, being luddite isn’t going to help.
Investment in the right technology and its adaption can offer an edge over the other competitors in the industry. Let’s try to understand where to start with technology and how it can benefit startups.
Start with people
When a team works in silos, they may not understand the importance of using a new application that will help the company’s overall business.
However, if the team understands the big picture of the business and its vision for the future, they will easily comprehend and support the invested technological advances.
My advice is to get buy-in from every level. Once you see that the new technology has the potential to save time and drive innovation, next you need is to sell that vision to your team who will use the technology daily.
Lean workforce
Every business has operations that are repetitive and tedium. Adopting technology that can automate certain tasks - such as the influx of support tickets, workflow for escalation process to avoid bottlenecks, invoice processing and payment reminder to your customers; these are just a few examples that can allow your team to do higher-value work that brings more value to the business and also allow an individual to be more engaged in their jobs.
On a fundamental level, automation tools like BPA can equip your staff with the skills and mindset to spot inefficiencies and address them with technological solutions.
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Your team will be able to process more complex problems quickly and communicate effectively which will allow your team to have the maximum impact on output by applying minimum energy on input.
Use data to drive results
Many of the startups fail because nobody needed the products those startups were offering. Smart startups first scrabble into an in-depth market analysis where they learn about their target audience and pain points.
They create metrics using data and perform extensive research to know if the solution can potentially meet customer needs, startups should create a Minimal Viable Product that captures their idea and bring it into the market as quickly as possible.
That’s how a startup can validate the potential of their project and gain feedback from users to make their products or services even better.
Don’t stop after a rollout. You should try to gain momentum with each implementation instead of letting another solution become stagnant before starting the process over again. Measure user impact metrics, ROI, and other meaningful interactions, and then use that information to make the business offering better with the help of technology.
If we take an example of a game startup company, right after the rollout of a new game. It is critical to know how a player is making progress to the next level which could mean a lot of things such as levelling up, completing quests, completing missions, or completing milestones.
Scaling up
Early investment in tech with a strong vision for the future means you are more likely to make the right decisions for the long term. It will also help to avoid mistakes that limit growth and to eliminate wastage.
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Without the right technology to support your startup, you may end up in a situation called premature scaling. Problems start when the owners begin to focus on one area of their operation and advance it without proper synchronization with other parts of their operations.
This is normal because as an Owner you may not be able to keep track of everything unless you have a technology that allows you to see important details in a dashboard for better synchronization and decision making.
Technology can accomplish incredible things, if only it’s implemented in your business to tailor-fit your needs. The latest technology trends can make your job easier and give you an edge in the modern and evolving game in business.
Keep up with what’s hot in your industry and make the effort to integrate the technology that’s the best fit for your business. The tech industry has many exciting prospects to offer for startups with unique business propositions and solid products and services.
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