Biz model is navigation to accomplish financial viability

Is it better to set up a startup on my own or should I rope in co-founders? I need your valuable advice on this.

-Venkat, Hyderabad

It depends on your nature and nurture. It also depends on many other external factors too. There are many individuals, who are not very good at working alongside others, especially while sharing power and authority. On the other hand, there are few who can work very well with partners and share responsibilities.

Funding, resource mobilization, team building and size of business etc., are some variables to consider, while making the decision to initiate a startup with or without partners.

As market conditions evolve, startups may need to pivot their business models. How can an organizational strategy facilitate such pivots without causing chaos within the company?

-Aarav Khanna

It is important for startups to understand that a business model is the navigation to accomplish financial viability of an idea, when it is transformed into a product or service. Without a well thought out and well-designed business model it’s impossible to successfully become a profitable business.

Market conditions do evolve as markets are inherently dynamic. However, one has to take that into consideration while designing their business plan. Only in exceptional cases do the markets change so drastically that one needs to pivot the entire business plan.

Few alterations to a business plan are acceptable, however, drastic changes with secondary thoughts, lack of clarity and confusion can lead to massive disruptions in the organizational system and lead to wastage of resources, unreliability, misdirection and may lead to failure.

If organisational-strategy is led by top professionals, they will ensure that there are no knee-jerk, reactionary changes to the core business-plan of a startup.

How to drive network effect and reduce CAC in social commerce food startup? Also, let me know how to calculate LTV for a social platform?

-Surbhi Guha, Co-founder, Sortizy

You mentioned that you are into food industry and operating on social commerce platform. The core function of any business is to increase its network-effect. It becomes more critical if you are an online service provider.

What kind of problem you are trying to solve & how efficient you are at it is what drives ‘network effect’ of your enterprise.

If your customer interface and experience (UI & UX) are accurately designed to fulfill the need of your customer, it can certainly drive a better network effect. This strength can undermine your competition and draw more customers towards you.

A combination of quality delivery, excellent efficiency, smart promotion and customer delight can reduce the Customer Aquisition Cost (CAC) steeply.

If you wish to quantitatively measure, the LTV (Life Time Value) of a customer is the total sales spend on your platform. However, there are other qualitative variables like client referrals, feedback value, cross sales, etc, which can add to the total LTV.