How to Create a Startup: A Step-by-Step Success Guide for Founders

Creating a successful startup is more than just having a great business idea and building a cool product. 

Startup founders have a lot to think through. If you’re just getting started, you might be overwhelmed by all the to-dos — or you might not even know what all the to-dos are. 

So, how do you create a successful startup? 

We’ll show you how, step-by-step. 

What to put in place when starting a startup

We like to talk about how all startups start with “a great idea” — and that’s true! — but there’s a lot more than just an idea that goes into launching a startup business. 

To make that idea a reality, there are several foundational elements you need to have in place.

The problem you’re solving

The most important thing for a successful business is to have a real problem to solve. 

Many startups fail because of what Y Combinator calls “SISP,” or Solutions in Search of a Problem. 

With these kinds of ideas, you may have a great solution. For example, the idea to create an “Airbnb for work spaces,” where remote workers can rent office spaces in their area on a day-to-day basis. 

It’s a great idea! But does it solve an actual, felt problem among remote workers? 

Instead, start with a real problem among your target audience. Then, create a solution that solves that problem in a unique and helpful way. With your problem clearly in mind, you can move forward with clearer vision and direction. 

Your product

Your product is the solution to the problem you’ve identified. 

Ideally, it should offer a solution that is: 

• Simple — it solves the problem in an easy-to-use and straightforward way 
• Unique — it offers a different (better) solution than others available 
• Helpful — the problem is solved thoroughly  
• Relevant — it offers something your audience‌ really wants 

As you think about your product, you also need to consider how your product will be developed. That is, will you use traditional code to build your product or opt for a no-code solution? Your development strategy will likely depend on the next three categories — your team, your business model, and your funding. 

Your team

In the early stages, your team may just be you, or you and a co-founder. 

Keeping things small in the beginning and DIY-ing many tasks at first can reduce your expenses and extend your startup runway. For example, using a no-code development platform like Bubble gives you the ability to build V1 (and beyond!) of your product quickly, more affordably, and without a technical background. 

This allows you to keep your team small, move faster, and extend your runway. 

For tasks you can’t do — or can’t do efficiently — you can outsource it to a generalist, a freelancer, or ad-hoc help. 

For example, an accountant can make it significantly easier to manage your finances, file taxes, and maintain a healthy cash flow. While you could manage this on your own, in many cases, hiring an accountant, at least for part-time support, makes a major difference. 

Your business model

Developing a viable business model and a business plan is also key in building a strong foundation for a successful startup. 

Clarifying your business model early on makes it easier to create structure for building and launching your product, estimate revenue and expenses, and raise funding. 

Your funding sources

Determining costs and funding sources early on will also make it easier to build a successful startup. 

After all, how can you launch and grow your startup without an understanding of where your initial investments are coming from? 

We recommend starting by estimating costs. 

Although the cost to start a business varies widely depending on business type, model, and industry, there are some startup business costs that are common across most businesses. Work out some basic costs and expenses, then you’ll be in a good place to determine where your funding will come from. 

Some of the most popular funding options for small businesses and startups include: 

• Bootstrapping (or self-funding) 
• Startup incubators 
• Small business loans
• Raising venture capital funding 
• Peer funding or crowdsourcing 
• Business credit cards 

Your audience

Finally, your audience is key when building a startup. Ideally, you have an audience in mind when you’re building your product, so you can build according to their needs and problems. 

In some cases, it may take some time to find your product-market fit. We’ve known startups who spent several years looking for the right audience while building their product — and increased their prices twenty-fold once they found the perfect market. 

In short: It’s OK if you’re not completely sure of your audience yet, or if you need to pivot over time. But you should have some basics down when you’re getting started to provide some focus and direction. 

For example, you might ask yourself: 

• Who has the problem we’re solving ‌with our product? 
• Who does our solution serve compared to other solutions? 
• Who else has this problem that needs a different solution? 

The six phases of starting a startup

With these key elements in place (or at least mostly in place), you can start taking the steps necessary to test the viability of your startup, start building, and eventually launch and grow your business. 

Keep in mind that some of the elements above will continue to be developed as you move through this process.  

Phase 1: Early ideation

Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Just because you have a stroke of inspiration doesn’t mean it’s worth turning it into a business. You need to vet your ideas properly. 

Before you start investing time and resources into an idea, ask yourself a few questions, such as:

• Does your idea solve a real problem? 
• Do other people besides you have this problem? Have you received positive feedback about your idea? 
• What consumer pain point, want, or need will your idea meet?
• Are you the right person to work on this idea? 
• What resources do you need to get your idea off the ground?

If you’re stuck, use our method for finding good startup ideas. Just keep in mind: It can take a long time to stumble upon a winning idea, so don’t give up! 

Once you’ve got an idea you feel confident about — or at least, interested enough to pursue further — you’ll want to analyze the industry and market to get an idea of how your solution will fit in with the existing market. 

It’s helpful to understand: 

• The target market size
• The competitive landscape 
• Market demographics 
• Projected growth 
• The funding environment (as relevant) 

Market research helps you understand how many people may be interested in your solution, what other solutions exist, how much competition you’ll have, and how easy (or difficult) it may be to raise funding. 

This allows you to further validate if this is the right idea for you and your current resources and interests. 

Phase 2: Validation

Validating your idea helps you start turning it into an actual product and startup. 

Beyond market research, validating your idea and product can look like: 

• Building a prototype or MVP to test. An MVP — or minimum viable product — or a prototype helps you build a basic version of your product for testing, raising funding, or gathering user feedback. 
• Talking to customers, either by doing user interviews, or by doing user testing on a prototype or MVP. 
• Joining a startup incubator or founder community to share, fine-tune, and improve your ideas with other startup founders. 

Building an MVP or a prototype is one of the best ways to get validation. Not only does it give you a foundation for securing buy-in (see Phase 3), but it also helps you start getting your product out to your target market for user feedback, usability testing, and early iteration to improve product-market fit. 

Phase 3: Getting buy-in

At this phase, you’re ready to start building and developing your startup further — moving from the ideation and validation phases into the launching and growing phases. 

Before you do that, something very important has to happen, which is: You need to get several layers of buy-in for your startup business and your product. 

Here’s how to do that: 

Build an invested team. As mentioned earlier, your team early on can be small — but you shouldn’t go at it alone. Your “team” also doesn’t just include people who are working full-time on your startup or being paid by your business. Your team can include everyone from: 

• Your co-founder
• Engineers or developers
• Sales and marketing leads
• Advisors or mentors 
• Investors (including early angel investors) 
• Legal or financial advisors 
• Outsourced ad-hoc help for other tasks 

This is why networking is so important for early-stage founders. 

Cultivating a wide network gives you more opportunities to share your product and refine your idea. It also helps you meet and connect with others who are excited about the product you’re building and gives them a chance to invest or connect with you for potentially working together.

Establishing your business. At this stage, you’re starting to get some lift, so it’s time to establish your business from both a legal and financial angle as well. 

At the very least, this includes: 

• Choosing a legal business structure (i.e., registering your business as an LLC or a Corporation) 
• Choosing a location for your startup (even if you’re operating remotely)
• Registering your business with the IRS (i.e., getting an employer identification number, also known as an EIN) 
• Obtaining any necessary licenses and permits
• Getting business insurance, as needed 
• Registering for any patents, trademarks, or other protection for Intellectual Property (IP) 
• Setting up founder and investor agreements, as needed 

Acquiring capital from external investors. If you’re planning to raise external funding, this is usually the right time to start thinking about raising a seed round (or even a pre-seed round) to get the funding you need to build and develop your product. 

Venture capitalist (VC) funding is pretty hard to come by, depending on your industry and startup type. Most venture capital investors are looking for startups that have a high potential for scalability and revenue. Even so, most startups never receive venture funding. 

In 2023, there were about 970,000 new startups founded between Q1 and Q3. In comparison, in 2023, just 11,000 VC-backed deals were reached, which means that only about 0.01 of new startups received VC funding. 

That’s not to say it’s impossible to raise funding — ‌you just shouldn’t expect it as a given. To put yourself in a better place to raise funding, you’ll want to: 

• Thoroughly research and understand your market. Consider creating a competitive analysis to define how your business will provide a unique selling proposition (USP). 
• Create a detailed business plan. Include details that potential investors will want to know, such as financial breakdowns and projections, marketing plans, descriptions of products and services, other funding sources, and any details on existing growth and audience. 
• Build an MVP or a prototype. Having something to show potential investors to give them an idea of your product, what you’re capable of building, and how it resonated with your audience will go a long way in gaining buy-in from investors. A no-code tool like Bubble can help you create wireframes, prototypes, and fully-functional MVPs to show (and impress!) investors.  

Bootstrapping your startup. If raising funding isn’t a good option for your startup, you might consider bootstrapping. 

Bootstrapping, aka self-funding, relies on the resources of the founder(s) to develop and launch your product and keep the company running until you start bringing in revenue. 

Like every funding option for startups, bootstrapping comes with pros and cons: 

In general, bootstrapping can be a better choice for companies who plan to scale more slowly or expect it to take a lot of time and development to scale. 

Many companies who start with bootstrapping eventually raise funds when they’re ready to scale up and grow, so it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision. It’s more about determining what type and what level of funding you need at this stage to take you to the next phase of your startup. 

Phase 4: Building and development 

Once you’ve validated your business idea and secured the necessary buy-in, the next stage is developing your product. 

Many startup founders want to move fast. Momentum is good! But having a clear plan in place for product development can make things a lot more efficient. 

Remember: Speed doesn’t equal efficiency. 

So, how do you make the building and development process as efficient as possible?

• Implement a product development roadmap. Product development roadmaps set a detailed course for the entire scope of product development. They’re typically pretty granular. Their goal is to define specific features, designs, and work to be done to take your product from ideation to launch. 
• Use a no-code development platform. No-code development is faster, more efficient, and requires less resources than traditional coding. Building on a no-code platform like Bubble means you can often develop your product in just weeks or months, compared to months or years for traditional code. Even better, you can usually do so with just one Bubble Developer on board — or even build it yourself as a founder. 
• Get the right team on board first. At this stage, it really helps to have the right people on board to help you build. The types and number of people you’ll need depends on your product development plan and product complexity, but getting your team in place first will help make building faster. 
• Consider applying for a startup accelerator. Startup accelerators can be a great way to get funding and mentorship for building and launching the first version of your product. If there’s an accelerator that fits your business goals and industry, this is a great stage to put in an application. 

At the end of the day, our biggest piece of advice is to start with an MVP and launch sooner rather than later. 

Your product doesn’t need to be perfect from day one.

More important is that you get it launched and into the hands of your audience. This will give you so much valuable information on what your audience really needs and cares about, how they want to use your product, and how you can iterate on it to grow and scale. 

Phase 5: Launch

Finally: It’s time to go live! 

As you launch your product, focus on: 

Establishing your brand presence. This includes everything from creating a company website and social accounts, to setting up contact channels, to designing your visual brand and identity. 

These elements don’t have to be fancy at first. If you don’t have the skills to do them yourself, outsource the basics to a freelancer. 

Setting up a launch strategy. The launch of a new product is a great time to generate excitement, so make the most of this moment! There are so many types of marketing you can do for your launch — from PPC (pay-per-click) ads to working with influencers, leveraging your own social channels and network, going on podcasts, launching sales and campaigns, and more. 

Word-of-mouth marketing can be especially effective early on as well, especially if you already have a sizable and well-defined target audience. 

Connecting with customers. Growing your audience and getting to know your early adopters well is crucial at this stage. It helps create loyal customers who will talk about your brand (word-of-mouth marketing!) and gives you the insight you need to iterate and improve your product. Connecting with customers includes everything from: 

• Setting up sales channels and doing outreach 
• Running user surveys and user testing to gather feedback 
• Creating a community for your users and/or target audience, if relevant 
• Setting up customer support channels for users to get the support they need 
• Doing customer interviews to understand your audience 

The more you can stay in touch with your customers, the easier it’ll be to establish a strong product-market fit. This will improve your competitive advantage while also improving customer loyalty. 

Phase 6: Scaling and beyond

With your product launched, your startup is officially open for business. Now, you need to focus on gaining traction and moving beyond the startup phase: growing, scaling, and achieving profitability. 

As you move into this phase, some things that will help: 

Continue to test and iterate on your product. Testing and iterating is an ongoing phase of your product development. Once you’ve launched V1, you should run user testing to gather feedback, and start iterating and improving to strengthen your product. 

Building on a no-code tool like Bubble makes iterating a lot easier. Instead of building an MVP to test, and then rebuilding your product with traditional code, you can build and iterate directly on top of your MVP, making the process much faster. Bubble also has a number of user testing integrations which can give you even more insights for your product. 

Boost your marketing. If you have a strong product-market fit, your existing customers can be a great marketing resource for your company. Happy customers can promote your product to others organically and leave positive reviews. 

At some point, though, you’ll want to invest in a more robust marketing plan. Hiring a marketing lead to take this on can make it a lot easier to invest in things like: 

• PPC ads 
• Marketing campaigns 
• Direct marketing 
• Organic marketing, like email and social media 
• Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO)  

Your marketing strategy will be as unique as your startup. The key is to prioritize investing in marketing as soon as you’re ready to scale and grow. 

Know when you want to raise funding and expand your team (or not). There isn’t a right or wrong answer to the question of raising funding and expanding your team. 

In Bubble’s case, co-founders Josh and Emmanuel built and grew Bubble themselves for five years before hiring more engineers to come on board and help them continue to scale. They also didn’t raise external funding until seven years in. 

Both of these decisions gave them more agility in the early days. “We wanted to focus on being sustainable, delivering value to customers first,” Emmanuel recalls.  

Bubble became a venture-backed company in 2019, after bootstrapping and then funding with company revenue. At that point, Bubble had established itself as a major player in the development space, built a loyal audience, and developed a platform and team that could scale. This made fundraising conversations easier, and helped Josh and Emmanuel feel confident taking on external funding. 

Determining what factors matter most to you when deciding how to grow your team and raising funding will help make those decisions easier as they come up. Keep in mind that in the startup world, things tend to move and change quickly, so you may want to continue to revisit these decisions every six months or so and adjust as needed. 

Serve your customers first, always. Keeping your customers at the heart of your product strategy and growth plan will make it easier to grow in the long run. 

Work intentionally to keep their needs, desire, and voice at the heart of your planning and product development. When you do, you continue to increase customer trust and product-market fit — and you can’t go wrong there. 

Build and launch your startup on Bubble

When you’re ready to turn your idea into a real product, Bubble makes it easier to develop and launch. 

Bubble’s full-stack, no-code development platform lets you create fully functional websites and web apps, without writing a single line of code. What can you build? The sky’s the limit! Build a social media app, a marketplace, CRMs, SaaS tools, and more.  

Need more ideas? Take a look at what other startup founders are building on Bubble: 

• Founder Eissra Eltom built Verve — an employee engagement marketplace — on Bubble herself in just 10 weeks using Bubble’s Immerse program for founders. After launch, Verve drove $60,000 in revenue in its first quarter of business! 
• Dr. Abrar Gundroo, co-founder of Messly, a recruitment platform for locum doctors, switched to Bubble when they needed to pivot and iterate faster. Abrar estimates that after switching to Bubble, app development was “probably 12 to 20 times faster than what we did before.” That speed has given them a huge competitive edge in developing new features and adapting to customer needs — and helped them get acquired by a major global firm.
• Michael Magdongon and Ben Waterman built Strabo, a global personal finance and investments tracker. They built on Bubble for speed and ease, preferring to DIY their MVP and iterate from there. It took them just two months and $320 to build and launch Strabo — then they scaled to a $1.5 million valuation. 

Whatever startup idea has been on your mind, Bubble can make it easier, faster, and less expensive to build and launch. Sign up for our email newsletters to get more expert advice for founders — or sign up for Bubble and get started building right away →