Coming up with a new business idea is never going to be enough. Your idea may well be the next big thing in the information technology industry in Hong Kong or even globally, but you will need way more to make it through to produce a product and selling your product.
- Find a co-founder to be your long term business partners. When you are based in Hong Kong, ideally you should look for someone locally.
- Identify the skills (in people) that your business needs.
- Find and rent an office space in a relatively inexpensive area in Hong Kong for the next employees you are going to hire in the next 6 months.
- Get the paperwork of company formation completed with Hong Kong Companies Registry in HK.
- Once you have your company registered legally as an entity in Hong Kong, you will start seeking potential angel investors.
- Create a business proposal for any investors who are interested in your business and ideas.
Ahead of you while you are trying to make sense of and grow your Hong Kong company in your daily operation, you will face a lot of problems. The problems would never come one after one systematically, but will only come randomly.
- Financial issue: Your business will need capital to expand. On the way growing, you will have to proactively look for potential investors.
- Business model: When your business model is right, there is always a way to charge for money from the product or service you’re providing to your users and/or customers.
- Product development: You and your tech development team may hit a few brick walls on the way to develop the actual product.
- Branding and positioning: For a startup company, branding may be really difficult. But it will go into a straight road when you keep doing it. Positioning of your product should come along. When positioning higher, your product may be sold for more profit, and at the same time you must make sure your product is developed better than your competitors.
- Regulations: Depending on the type of product you are developing, government may have regulations that your business must meet.
- User demand: When you have made your decisions right in the beginning, your product should have a user base size that is viable for your product to have sufficient market share. This sufficient market share is important for the potential growth of your business and product.
- Sales and marketing: Even when you have a great product, you will still have to be able to sell it and preferably in volume to your customers. The money received from selling your product is going to support your business in long term.
- Price competition: The race to the lowest price would never end. Your major competitors may reduce the pricing of their product which is similar to your main product. Going into a price war is never ideal, but in many cases it is not avoidable.
- Reputation and customer retention: Growing your company reputation is important, and it may be done through providing great customer services.
- Employee performance and productivity: Your new staffs may be fresh and feel like to work fast in the beginning. But their passion or work rate may wear off as time goes by. This may negatively affect productivity. It is important to regularly monitor the performance of your employees to ensure relatively higher productivity.
