Being an entrepreneur today is no easy task. In fact, if you took a look at the chances of success, there are actually more that will not make it than those that will succeed.
Today more than ever, with the number of niche products and the fierce competition it’s imperative to truly create a unique product or service that can exist in a blue ocean. It’s been said that typically, 20 percent of small businesses fail in their first year, 50 percent in their fifth year, and 70 percent after a decade of being in business.
Knowing these numbers can make anyone hesitant to step out on the entrepreneurial superhighway, but here are a few things that can help prevent you from becoming a statistic!
1- Find your Blue Ocean
So what is a blue ocean? Well here’s the official explanation from their site:
Blue Ocean Strategy was developed by globally pre-eminent management thinkers Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. They observed that companies tend to engage in head-to-head competition in search of sustained profitable growth. Yet in today’s overcrowded industries competing for head-on results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Lasting success increasingly comes, not from battling competitors, but from creating blue oceans of untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.
Blue Ocean Strategy challenges everything you thought you knew about strategic success and provides a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant.
Finding your blue ocean can definitely give you a leg up when it comes to the market actually seeing your product through all the competition.
2- Find your ideal avatar prior to launching a new product or service
I see this happen all the time. The entrepreneur ‘believes’ the market needs their product, so they invest their life savings into building a prototype, website, system, and staff.
But never taking the time to do the market research to ensure there is an actual market that is willing and able to pay for the product.
This is a recipe for failure time and time again.
Old school business strategists will ask you to see your business plan… I want to see your customer avatar and keyword research. I want to see actual data that there is a viable market that is willing to purchase your product or service.
3- Invest in the right product and services
The days of building out tons of products and inventory then selling them are gone.With the availability of print-on-demand and so many other options, you are no longer required to create the product prior to testing the market’s viability. Here’s what I’d suggest:
- Create your customer avatar (know who you are trying to sell to)
- Launch a sales page to introduce the product/service you are exploring to bring to market
- Send traffic to it and see if people have an interest in purchasing
- If they are ready to buy, then you can take orders and produce the product as people purchase
- If they don’t have interest, but you are still set on the product… then you will need to go back and do some more research.
Remember, people buy what they want not necessarily what you may think they need.
Bottomline: Sell them what they want.
4- Passion will keep you warm during the cold lonely nights.
Throughout the many years of my consulting, I have consistently worked with startups and entrepreneurs that didn’t necessarily have the best plan or direction, but what they did have was a ton of passion for their idea.This can move mountains, especially during the startup.
Passion is what will keep you motivated when everything else looks dark. And that dark time will come at one point or another during this journey. Passion and determination to get your product to market
If you find you are not that passionate about the idea, you should probably keep moving and find another one because, without it, it could be even more challenging to succeed.
5- Using the right resources at the right time.
Now considering you are reading this article on the ultimate website for resources in marketing, it wouldn’t be complete without me mentioning how important your tools and resources are in the many different phases of launching a business. Too soon and you can waste thousands of dollars, too late and it can stall your growth.
Take the time to select the right tools based on where you are with some thought as to where you are headed.Besides this website and the resources we offer, ask friends, ask online groups. You don’t have to go it alone when it comes to making these decisions.
So ask for help. Remember, we don’t need to know all the answers, we just need to get good at asking questions. Someone has already done it. So in order to ensure your business is on the right path to success, work on heading off the many traps that can slow down your chances of being in that 20 percent of small businesses that fail in their first year.
Here’s a great infographic on small-business failures from Insurance Quotes’, check out below.

What’s worked for you? Share with us so others coming after you can learn!