Listen to this articleIf you love tech news, following stories of ingenuity and innovation closely, you will come to realize how easy it is to build a business around some aspect of it that fascinates you.
Some of your customers will appreciate your business idea right away and delight in every offer you make to promote it, while others will see you as a resource to help them demystify its potential uses and benefits.
Many business models are available: You could sell a single innovative product or a popular range of devices; invent a product from scratch, writing code for an application that solves an unmet marketing need; or develop an education business, explaining the nuances of technology through books, blogs, podcasts, seminars, or workshops.
If you’ve found some particular technology that you love and that you know other people would love to learn how to use, then here are a few ideas on how to create a start-up around your passion.
Build Your Tech Team
Hiring a technical staff will require a slightly more demanding approach than simply hiring staff members with business-related skills. Of course, you won’t have to reinvent the entire recruitment process from scratch. You will still use traditional selection and screening processes, such as asking for resumes, conducting interviews, and running a background check for employment.
But a few things will be different: interviewing and advertising your open position.
The interview will have to be more vigorous because you will want to know details about the candidate that are rarely mentioned in a resume. Elon Musk, for example, has said in many media interviews that when he is hiring someone for one of his tech companies he considers educational credentials and resumes secondary. What he really wants to know during the hiring interview is the candidate’s levels of creativity, ingenuity, and innovation.
Advertising your open positions is also a little more challenging. Focus on industry-specific boards when hiring technologists. For instance, advertise on developer-specific job boards if your business revolves around coding. Yet sometimes even finding just the right job boards may not be enough to find the best candidates, which means that you will have to improve your outreach game.
Marketing and Selling
Products are marketed and sold based on features and benefits. Traditional products emphasize benefits over features because little explanation is needed to describe the features of familiar products. Marketing and selling in technology can be slightly different, with a greater emphasis on features before getting to the benefits.
In fact, describing what a product is accounts for 80% of the marketing and sales process if the technology is so unique that people don’t understand what it is when they first see it. At first glance, for example, the Restorative Bed, could be mistaken for a luxury mattress, but it’s a remarkable reinvention of the bed. Offering unusually high restorative functions for sleep, this “bed” comprises 100 computerized pneumatic cushions that redistribute support for the body in different ways than a spring or foam mattress.
If you were marketing and selling a product like this on your eCommerce website or in a brick-and-mortar store, you would spend most of your time explaining what the bed is. It would also be helpful to share its origin story, talk about how it has improved various sleep disorders, and explain why it was necessary for technologists to collaborate with sleep specialists to engineer all its therapeutic benefits.
An Unexpected Bonus
As you build a startup around a particular technology, you will learn more about the technology yourself, perhaps even building other businesses around your core product. In a real sense, any technology, whether hardware or software, is a labyrinth of possibilities and permutations.
