Nine Essential Steps To Make It Through As A Hong Kong Startup

Almost 90% of all startups in the world (not just from Hong Kong) failed. It is important to have the mental preparation before jumping into entrepreneurship. Below are the 10 essential steps to think through before your Hong Kong company incorporation (i.e. business formation).

You must validate your idea (or ideas). You must ask yourself and your “will-be” customers different questions to figure out a few things about your product that you are going to develop. This is the first step to validate your idea (whether it is for the Hong Kong market, or elsewhere).

Find a co-founder. You cannot win it all by yourself. If you are a person who can convince people to do things for you, you may need to find a co-founder who is a natural programmer. You will need such as a role to lead the line when developing your MVP product.

Create a prototype and a minimum valuable product (i.e. MVP). Using this prototype and MVP approach, you are virtually letting the users to identify whether your product has a market that is large enough for you to keep pouring resources and budget into developing the product.

Develop a business model for your HK business. When it comes to a startup, the startup may develop a product, but it may be a product that people would pay to use it. You may launch a product as a free product. But ultimately in the product it must have some elements that you can charge people to use. This is the part where the business model must be built into your product.

Work on and create your business plan. One type of plan is to write for the investors (or potential investors) who you will get fund from to accelerate your company’s growth. Another type of plan is for the founder/co-founder to keep track of projects and milestones. In your plan you must set goals with deadlines. For example, the goals may be progressive goals where you would complete the first goal during stage one, and goal number two in stage two and three.

Develop your business into brand. All marketers will tell you branding is rather important. You may have a local brand that is for the Hong Kong market, or you may eventually extend your brand to other countries in Asia, or even globally.

Register your company in Hong Kong. Make your business a legitimate business. Later you will need this to attract and accept investment from investors.

Develop a pitch deck. It may be for you to sell your ideas. It may be for your sales representatives to sell your product.

Get funding. It costs a lot of money to run and maintain a company. You will need to continue to maintain the daily operations. Also, when you are to accelerate the growth, you will need more money or investment. You must find one or a few investors who can share the same dream as you, and will commit in long term for their investment to your business.