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How to become a startup entrepreneur?: This is a common question which I come across from many startup enthusiasts. There are multiple ways of becoming a startup entrepreneur. For some, it can be through starting a business directly. For others, it might be through the route of creating a business plan while there’s another route about starting it within a company through intrapreneurship. As you can see, there is no one simple answer to how to become a startup entrepreneur. But the core tenet is that you start a business from an idea. It is about taking risks and creating business opportunities.

As you know, the primary requirement for becoming an entrepreneur is to take risks. When these risks lead you to commercial opportunities, you are en route to becoming a startup founder.

How to become a startup entrepreneur?

The starting point in entrepreneurship is to create a business. The turning point is about registering a business, applying for bank accounts and even creating your first invoice. All these can easily be the first steps to becoming a startup entrepreneur. If however, you’re looking for the long-term view of creating a business, I’d recommend starting with the idea to develop your business.

Start with the idea

For any new business, it is the idea which is central to creating a business. In some articles, I’ve argued that the idea isn’t everything. But in the early stages, the idea is everything because we haven’t groomed it yet or taken measures to protect it sufficiently. Start with this idea, find a commercial opportunity for that idea. once you have these two, identify whether there’s an opportunity to scale and whether there’s a unique selling point and you have the knowledge to make this work.

Build the idea into a business proposal

Once you have an idea and have inclinations towards a commercial model, it is time to build a business proposal. These are usually one of the most important stages because commercials are involved and there’s an opportunity to validate the idea through this. The business proposal is all about identifying how much the service will cost, its maintenance and its longevity as a commercial model. As you start strategising this, think about how to expand this commercial model to other users and find out if there’s a common market that you can sell this to.

Register your business

You can do this right at the start or at a stage when you have the commercials. This step becomes important when you have chances for a commercial opportunity. Once you know that it is possible, registering a business would be one of the first steps. In parallel, you can also create a website, solicit customer feedback and find ways to formalise your business. This helps you with the next steps of building the business plan and creating a strategy that can be built further.