Startups — Answering the What, Why and When

What it is, Why it has become a “culture” and When this culture started blooming. All you need to know about startups from what it is and how it is different from small companies to the factors that are promoting the startup culture today.

When I hear the word “start-up”, my mind immediately creates the image of four tech-savvy people in denim, sitting in a circle in a casual setting, making hand gestures and typing on their laptops. They might have found a new problem that needs a solution and been working to find out the best possible solution.

They’re their own bosses and have nothing around them to control them. Sounds like the dream life. But is this what a start-up actually is? Are all start-ups about technology? Is it as easy and promising an initiative as it seems? Does a start-up have to be newly set up to be called a startup?

To answer all these questions and to actually make you feel how it is to be one of those four tech-savvy people and how actually they reached there, we bring to you a series of articles on Startups.

In this first article, we will mainly focus on developing an understanding of what startups are, how they work and funnily, what makes this concept so significant that we’re doing a whole series on them!

What is a startup?

According to Investopedia, “A startup is a young company founded by one or more entrepreneurs to develop a unique product or service and bring it to market.” Let’s study this definition bit by bit.

If we go by this definition, the purpose of a startup would be “to develop a unique product or service and bring it to market.” Now, what is this “unique product” we’re talking about? And what makes it unique? There could be two ways a product or service could be regarded as unique:

1. The product is a solution to a unique problem i.e. either one whose solution has not been found or one which was just never looked at as a problem before. The latter seems a bit mind-tickling, doesn’t it? Well, let’s take an example — with the advent of this pandemic, many such problems arose. Did we ever think, educational institutes would require to take classes for students entirely online? But once we did realise the need, it was a problem that needed a solution. Hence, a unique problem, requiring a unique solution.
2. The product is a better (and thus unique) solution to an already existing problem with already existing solutions. To take an example, let’s talk about companies like Uber and Zomato that started as startups. Delivering food was already possible before Zomato came up. But was it as efficient and easy? We all today, would much rather prefer to open the Zomato application and be done with ordering food in just a few clicks than calling up a restaurant, asking the person to read out their menu and all the hassle. Not to mention, the payment becomes easy through these applications and the hassle of finding change for the money etc. just vanishes!

Next comes the purpose of bringing it to the market. The reason that not every small firm is called a startup, sources out of this point. We will talk about this in the next section.

Read the full article on Coding Ninjas Blog.