Anyone who has been involved with an early-stage start-up will tell you that there are always numerous challenges to moving their business forward. For digital tech start-ups what are the challenges and common issues they need to overcome to enable growth and sales revenue?
All early-stage digital tech start-ups need to secure funding and depending how long the business has been operating the funding situation can vary. Many start-ups are self-funded and once the business becomes established and their model is proven seed funding can be sought from private investors, VC’s or Angel Investors. Whichever route the founders pursue the terms imposed by investors can sometimes be demanding for them to manage.
Managing Finance and Funding.
The key to securing funding to help a business grow is to clearly demonstrate that the business model works and that it can gain sales revenue. Once the founders are in a position to scale up, they may well move to Series A funding. Managing multiple investors with different demands on reporting and involvement can put a strain on any management team. At these early stages the ‘burn rate’ (how fast the business goes through funding) can outstrip revenue so the pressure on financial management is high and the business must quickly scale up revenue to win new customers and exceed their ‘burn rate’.
Having Realistic Sales Expectations.
Many start-ups have very optimistic views on their projected sales and customer acquisition growth. It’s great that they believe in their product or service but they are entering a market where existing and future competitors are active too. In addition, they are working with an unknown brand and so trust and loyalty has yet to be earned. Sales and marketing spend is going to use up investor’s funds fast so spending wisely and monitoring ROI on marketing spend is essential.
Building Partnerships.
One way to fast-track new business is to build relationships with key partners as this can add credibility to the digital tech start-up as well as providing opportunities to work together on new business development initiatives. Founders can struggle to find good relevant partners to work with so they should reach out to their investors and advisors for assistance in cementing any potential partnerships.
Hiring Talent.
Often cited as one of the biggest challenges for digital tech start-ups is the hiring of new staff and teams. Once funding is secured investors often expect this to be used to build teams to rapidly deliver new tech products and services. With limited resources there is no space for bad hiring decisions so the early-stage start-up founders are going to have to select new talent carefully. Aside from having the necessary technical skills potential candidates need to be a good cultural fit used to working within small dynamic teams with experience in the digital tech start-up sector. In a competitive market digital tech start-up founders should use whatever resources they can to shorten the recruitment and selection process and increase the chances of recruiting the right talent fast, hiring tools and technology can assist with this.
One such company who are game changing the face of recruitment by providing a robust process to ensure more efficient recruitment using any channel is Hire Digital, a start-up recruitment company with a global presence that has invested heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage the digital tech recruitment process. Their talent management software platform gives digital talent recruiters a strict criterion for posting job adverts and descriptions and their AI works in such a way that it generates a much smaller more targeted candidate list by using up to 40,000 attributes. They key to this is efficiency, recruiters spend less time generating job advertisements and trawling through hundreds of CV’s to get their shortlist, Hire Digital tech can rapidly access up to 1bn talent globally.
Hire Digital is an AI technology with a human touch that is completely revolutionising the recruitment and selection process. It’s two times faster, 50 % cheaper and ten times more accurate than traditional hiring tech. To find out more speak to Robin Brohl at Hire Digital he is a real person and would love to engage with you and help you streamline your recruitment processes.