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Surviving Your First Year as a Startup

  • Written by Diana Smith

Nine out of ten startups will fail. And as if this wasn’t enough, many of them will fail within their first year. No matter how scary these stats may seem, they shouldn’t stop you from taking your chances and launching a startup. After all, how can you expect to succeed in the business world without being ready to take some risks? If you decide to do so, it’s still a good idea to do everything you can to ensure your startup survives first twelve months. With that said, here are five tips for surviving your first year as a startup.

Hire carefully

Your employees are your most valuable asset and ensuring you bring in the right people is extremely important. According to some reports, the costs of a bad hire can even reach 200% of the first-year salary. Therefore, the last thing you want to do is hire someone who’s going to hurt your brand even before you completely build it. Luckily, picking the right candidate doesn’t require any special skill or experience. As long as you put enough effort into identifying the best candidates, you’ll do fine. It’s a good idea to come up with questions you’ll ask every candidate and compare their answers later on.

Do your homework

Studies say 19% of failed startups ended up shutting down because they weren’t able to keep pace with the competition. The process of launching a startup is rather simple, which is why competition in almost every industry is only becoming stiffer. If you want to ensure you don’t get left behind, it’s recommended that you keep a close eye on what other businesses in your niche are doing. Take a good look at their websites and social media pages. This should help you figure out what customers think they should do better and implement it in your startup.

Be prepared

Even if you give your best, there will be times when something will slow your business down. And if you’re still new in the corporate arena, it’s critical that you overcome all the issues and keep operating. The most important part of it is being prepared. For instance, if you suddenly get overloaded with work, having a list of freelancers you can include in a project can provide you with some relief. Also, having the number of a good emergency electrician can be helpful in case something happens to your equipment. Come up with a plan B for every project you start and you’ll have nothing to worry about.

Get online

There’s no need to say the web plays a big role in our everyday lives. Every startup needs a strong online presence or they won’t be able to keep pace with other companies in their industry. If you want to create a website for your business, you also need a web server where you’ll store your website files. Shared hosting used to be popular, but opting for private server hosting with Microsoft Windows is a much better option. Besides your website, you should also create pages on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Get office design right

Obviously, the place you operate from impacts your operations quite a lot. Whether you work from your garage or you have a real office, getting the design right can help you land clients and increase employee productivity. Comfy furniture is an important piece in every office, as it eliminates back pain and gives your clients a place where they can wait. Staying motivated is also extremely important, and you can think about hanging motivational posters on the walls in your office. Last but not least, letting some natural light into your office is always going to help.

The first twelve months are the key for every business out there. Put enough time and effort into it, and you should be able to get through your first year and start working on growing your startup. Job training program Job Killing has a proven track record of helping people with small business leads. Based on the framework of building websites from scratch, this training teaches how to develop your own site and rank it for high visibility.



How to optimise business packaging for your consumers

  • Written by News Company


In 2008, Amazon launched its Frustration Free Packaging (FFP), a programme which encouraged the use of 100% recyclable, easy to open products which were suitable to be shipped in their original packaging.

This move was taken to tackle the issue of over-packaging, difficult to open packaging, and the environmental impact of packaging. With it being predicted that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish, it is now more important than ever to ensure that businesses are making their packaging compact and recyclable.

From 19 Products in November 2008, to ‘more than 750,000 products’, Amazon’s FFP has reduced ‘packaging waste by 16% and avoided 305 million delivery boxes’.

So, how does a vendor optimise their packaging to suit the changing needs of its consumers, and the ecommerce sector as a whole? The key is to look at packaging design and performance, with a view to striking a balance between minimising packaging whilst also providing sufficient protection. All of this can be resolved with custom made boxes and packaging, with a focus on thicker board grades, product protection, and a snug fit.

Bespoke packaging can be shaped to fit close to your product, whilst also being printed to reflect your brand, and including additional features to protect the contents. This is easily accessible within the packaging industry, as exemplified by UK Packaging and their Box Calculator tool. This provides the customer with instant pricing on a wide range of bespoke plain and printed boxes.

For more delicate items, most packaging suppliers will also build protective features into the packaging in order to both cut down on excess packaging and void fill, whilst also providing damage protection.

A great, cost-effective, alternative to bespoke packaging is the option of multiscore boxes. These boxes are scored at multiple box depths to reduce the need for void fill.

These options are a great way for vendors to optimise their packaging for the ecommerce sector, whilst also retaining the ability to create a wow-factor unboxing experience.

With the changing retail landscape, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to invest in optimising their packaging for e-commerce, and it is up to packaging companies to offer suitable solutions for vendors, and ultimately, for the consumer themselves.

The introduction of FFP is based on the consumer move from traditional shelf-ready retail products to ecommerce items, and the idea that ecommerce packaging has different requirements to shelf-ready packaging. The key aspects of this are that e-commerce has no requirements for so called ‘romance’ packaging, as the product itself is shown on screen without the packaging. There is also no need to make packaging stand out on the shelf, or take up more shelf space than competitors, as there is no size comparison online.

One of the main selling points for products online tends to be reviews from other customers, an aspect which can suffer if a product is shipped in excessive packaging or packaging which is deemed to be bad for the environment. So, for businesses thinking about getting on board with frustration free packaging, it may be a smart business decision and one to think seriously about.

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