When you are starting a new venture, you need to assess various risks. I have listed some below, but each business and each persons circumstances will throw up different aspects that you would need to consider.
Concept risk:
Is the value proposition relevant for the intended target audience? (To assess this, you first need to clearly articulate what your value proposition is. ‘What you do’ is NOT the value proposition. What the users/buyers will get out of what you do is the value proposition. Check with your intended target audience if they feel that this is meaningful for them. If it is not, then evaluate if you need to adjust your value proposition (and therefore sometimes your product/service/concept itself) or you need to check if the value proposition is relevant to a different set of audiences (perhaps different age or income bracket or in a different geography or people in different circumstances than originally intended).
Revenue streams, business model and business case
You have to evaluate if your revenue streams and business model makes a business case that makes the venture worth your while. This is a critical process in your entrepreneurial journey and you need to take a realistic view of the costs and potential revenues.
In e-commerce businesses, you often have a disproportionately higher spend in acquiring the customer and you make monies on that customer only after a number of repeat purchases (or visits if the customer is not going to pay for services and you have alternate ways of making money – e.g. advertising or referrals)
Operational aspects
Evaluate the challenges around procurement, warehousing, logistics, etc. that you will have to deal with, and evaluate whether it is practical for you to overcome those challenges given your resources and circumstances.
People resources
Hiring people in startups is a challenge. You need to have some thoughts on how you are going to assemble your core team and your initial employees. Evaluate whether you will have some of the important functions in-house or outsource or use existing platforms (e.g. technology)
Marketing and customer acquisition costs
Quite often entrepreneurs do not spend enough time to understand the dynamics of customer acquisition. Especially in e-commerce ventures, you need to be able to get a clear sense of what activities you would do, how much they would cost and what conversions you could expect…. and therefore how much it will cost you to acquire customers.
And remember, the cost of customer acquisition is NOT just the cost of marketing. But the cost of all the direct resources that are involved in the marketing process + cost of marketing itself + a portion of cost of the central office and operations.
Understand the ‘unit economics’ and Capital required
While the ‘business as a whole may not be profitable’ for a while due to the overheads of managing the operations (and that is perfectly OK in most cases), you need to evaluate if your per unit economics are healthy. Are you going to make money on each sale. And how much will you make. And therefore, how many units do you need to sell to cover the cost of operations. And how much time will it take for you to ramp up to that scale. Is that possible? And is it possible within your given resources?
E.g. if your ‘central office’ costs (founders salaries, salaries of central office staff, rent, electricity, etc.) is USD 10,000 per month (using simplistic assumptions for easy of discussion). And your revenue per unit (product or service) is USD 20. And your gross margin is 40%. In this case, you are making USD 8 on each order.
Assume that your cost of customer acquisition was USD 50, and that each customer is likely to buy 4 times in a year (when you assume your numbers, make sure you have it validated with some research or understanding of the market… and is not a random number that is assumed based on your own expectations on how the market will behave), in which case your cost of customer acquisition itself is going to be recovered when the customer buys 6 – 7 times from you.
Now, given your view of the numbers you could ramp up this business to, you need to work out whether the USD 8 that you make from each order is sufficient to sustain you through your initial phase when the costs of USD 10,000 will be there every month + you will have to invest in marketing. (In many cases, the low ticket size of the product/service makes the business unviable. If you are going to make a few dollars from each customer, you need a LOT of customers to make the business case meaningful.).
Evaluate how much money you are going to require to startup. In estimating capital required, I urge you to overestimate costs and underestimate revenues. Do not let your enthusiasm guide your excel sheets. Do not assume that you wil multi-task and therefore save costs. (Even if that is possible for you, it cannot be sustained as you scale up when you need to move from ‘doing’ to ‘managing’). Also, many entrepreneurs make the mistake of assuming that they are smarter than others and therefore would be able to do it for a lesser investment than others before them have attempted (and even if that is true, keep that as a buffer rather than assuming that your smartness will be THE reason for you to do it better, faster, cheaper than others).
When you have a view of what kind of capital is required, evaluate different funding options. (Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of assuming that VCs are the first choice of funding for startups. And that need not be so. Understand what parameters VCs use for evaluating deals they invest in. See if you are ready for VC funding. Most likely, you may not be. In which case evaluate alternate ways of funding – boot strapping, family & friends round, advances from customers, debt, etc.).
