The Founder’s Guide on How to Start a Business
About the Author: Nick Himowicz
Nick Himowicz is a business model coach for entrepreneurs and senior leaders. He’s coached over 1,000 teams worldwide and was trained directly by Alex Osterwalder, the creator of the Business Model Canvas. Formerly at Strategyzer, Nick now helps founders build winning business models, test new ideas safely, and unlock growth (without wasting time or money). His clients include Google, American Express, LEGO, and Novo Nordisk.
Behind every successful business isn’t just a great product. It's a strong purpose, culture, and story. Most founders obsess over product features, but the hallmark of a truly successful entrepreneur is how they intentionally build their venture’s identity. Think of brands like Nike, Apple, and Patagonia. They haven’t just developed a product that customers love, but have a solid strategic vision and a story that makes people care about the brand.
In this step-by-step guide to creating a business, I’ll break down how to start a company using the three pillars of corporate identity—strategy, culture, and brand image—based on the ‘Strategic Guidance Framework’ model created by Strategyzer. Additionally, I will discuss the three tools that founders can utilize to implement the framework, which can accelerate startup growth.
1. Strategy
Apple had a great first product, the Apple I computer. However, before launching it in the market, they had to ascertain why they were entering the market and what their aspirations were. While the market already had players such as IBM and Microsoft, they became customer favorites by developing products with a user-friendly operating system and aesthetically pleasing hardware. Understanding your reason for being is what the first pillar strategy is all about. It involves determining why a startup business does what it does. It is a framework that addresses questions such as the organization's aspirations, the areas it aims to focus on in the long term, and the type of financial performance it seeks to achieve.
Rather than jumping straight into development, founders should focus on strategy in the initial stages of building a company. A venture has a solid strategic direction once it has capitalized on the right opportunity. So how do you uncover untapped opportunities? A tool founders can employ is the ‘Business Model Design Space’ by Strategyzer. Instead of relying on internal assumptions, the framework encourages founders to analyze the external environment that influences their business model design. It is built around four key areas:
Market forces: This aspect of the model involves understanding market issues, market segments, customer needs and demands, switching costs, and revenue attractiveness.
Industry forces: Analyzing competitors, new entrants, and product substitutes is key at this stage.
Key trends: It urges founders to dive into technological, regulatory, societal, cultural, and socio-economic trends.
Macroeconomic forces: It provides founders with a view of global market conditions, capital market conditions, current prices, and trends for commodities and resources used, as well as economic infrastructure.
For a startup founder, understanding "am I building the right thing, at the right place, at the right time?" is crucial. The two most essential elements of the ‘Business Model Design Space’ that founders must reflect on are:
Market forces: Market forces refer to customer-centric factors that influence demand, purchasing behavior, and revenue trends in the market. It is divided into four sub-parts:
Market Issues: This includes questions such as issues affecting the customer landscape, the shifts in the market, and the direction in which it is heading.
Market Segments: This covers aspects such as identifying customer segments, differentiating them into high-growth and declining segments, and determining the peripheral segments that have display potential.
Customer needs and demands: This aspect outlines the customer preferences and analyzes whether needs and demands are being met.
Switching costs: This aspect examines the costs associated with switching businesses. It asks questions such as what binds customers to a company, what switching costs prevent customers from switching to competitors, and how easily customers can find alternatives.
Industry Forces: Industry forces refer to the competitive and value chain factors that influence a startup’s decisions. It is divided into five sub-parts:
Competitor landscape analysis: In this step, founders must identify incumbent competitors in the market and assess their strengths and weaknesses.
Ease of entry for new entrants: Identifying new insurgent players and assessing factors such as their competitive advantages and disadvantages, value propositions, and cost structures is crucial at this stage.
Substitute products and services: An entrepreneur must conduct a thorough analysis of the potential substitutes for a startup’s offerings. It includes understanding which products can serve as replacements, the cost of producing those products, and whether it is easy for customers to switch to those products.
Stakeholder analysis: Research at this level involves identifying stakeholders who can impact the business model design and understanding the degree of influence they hold over it.
Let’s understand these concepts with an example of Simpals, a Moldovan digital media and online services company. They recognized that many needs in Moldova were going unmet by international companies and capitalized on that opportunity. They identified significant challenges faced in the country and built locally relevant solutions by adapting proven ideas from abroad. Spotting the right opportunity helped Simpals get crystal clear on who they are and what they care about.
While they have diversified into various industries, such as news, sports, and video production, over the past two decades, they have maintained a clear pattern and remained laser-focused on solving Moldova’s problems, something that other companies have ignored. They also focused on creating a long-term impact rather than just profits. For example, Sporter, one of their projects, was launched to make sports accessible to everyone, not just to turn a profit, but because it was the right thing to do.
2. Culture
Culture refers to the values, beliefs, and attitudes that align every member of the organization and shape how teams work. It is a key corporate identity pillar and encompasses unwritten rules, mindsets, and behaviors that shape how a team operates, the key behaviors that all team members must exhibit, and the mechanisms that can help build a positive culture. Developing a strong culture is a key component of a startup's strategy. Tools like the ‘Culture Map’ by Strategyzer can guide and shape their organization’s values and behaviors to achieve desired outcomes.
The Culture Map breaks down the concept into three layers:
Outcomes: This encompasses the behaviors that a founder hopes to see in the team.
Critical behaviors: The daily actions that can help lead to the outcomes.
Enablers and blockers: Factors that will reinforce or undermine these behaviors.
Let’s take a look at Simpals again. The Moldovan company built a culture that prioritizes autonomy, innovation, and experimentation. So, how did they do this from the ground up?
When Simpals faced a challenge of hiring skilled product managers, they established the Simpals Training Academy. It is an in-house training program that allows everyone to dedicate ten hours a week to learning new skills and applying them to projects. Launching an academy was a key ‘Enabler’ to shifting ‘Behaviours.’ With support from the training academy, each business unit has its innovation team that builds and tests new products without requiring managerial supervision. With these practices in place, it became inevitable for the company to grow into one with skilled teams capable of launching new products.
3. Story
Your brand’s image or story is the perception that customers have of a brand based on its messaging, product offering, and customer experiences. This pillar of corporate identity highlights what the company stands for and what stakeholders perceive the brand to be.
A key question founders must ask themselves while building a story is,
“How do we bring people along and create a movement?”
Consider Nike. Their products, such as the Air Max, are not only produced with excellent quality but also convey to their customers the vision that they, too, can train and perform like athletes. Often, creating a movement through your story is more potent than building the most technologically advanced product.
A tool that a startup founder can utilize to develop the brand story is Simon Sinek’s ‘Golden Circle’. It encourages founders to delve deep into why their business exists and what value it brings. Questions like “Why does your startup exist beyond making money?”, “What belief or mission drives it”? And “What differentiates your approach or values?” helps provide a clear framework and differentiate in a crowded market, not just with a better solution, but with a belief people want to rally behind.
Simpals is an excellent example of how a strong brand image can accelerate startup growth. In Moldova, people grew up believing that moving out of the country was the only way to be successful. Simpals challenged that perception and changed the story. Instead of leaving, the founder, Dmitri Voloshin, chose to build a brand in Moldova and solve local problems. By launching ventures across various industries, including news, video production, animation, and web development, they demonstrated that success and innovation could occur locally. Today, they have built a €10M business and continue to lead in multiple sectors. Additionally, they created Moldova’s first official typeface, which is now used for all government work and is available on Google Fonts. Simpals thus positioned themselves as a brand rooted in national pride and long-term commitment to local innovation.
Common Pitfalls that Derail Startup Growth:
According to the Founders Forum Group, a global community of business leaders empowering entrepreneurs, 42% of startups shut down due to misreading market demand, 29% due to funding issues, 23% suffer from team-related problems, and 19% are phased out due to competition. While failure is sometimes inevitable, startup founders should take care to cover all bases and avoid common pitfalls to ensure steady growth:
1) Treating culture as an afterthought
Six out of seven startup leaders believe that culture is critical to growth, according to research commissioned by AWS. It is imperative to build a team culture with a growth mindset that can convert challenges into opportunities right from the beginning. Building a startup culture also ensures that the values and objectives of all members are aligned with the company, and all stakeholders are in cohesion. The importance of building a sound culture is also reaffirmed by Steve El-Hage, founder and CEO of Drop. He intentionally built a culture that prioritized a balance between company growth and employee well-being. As the CEO, he took responsibility for ensuring that his team was motivated and aligned with the organization’s goals.
2) Building a brand disconnected from strategy
When building a brand, a founder cannot forget the strategy that guided their initial operations. Take Simpals as an example. Once they had decided to develop products that would address local needs, they adhered to that idea. Every month, they gather hundreds of new product suggestions and experiment with them to refine their offerings. If they are a success and align with Simpals’ strategy, the experiment evolves into a real business; if not, the idea is discarded immediately.
3) Ignoring shifts in the market and industry forces
Founders who neglect market research often end up wasting days and months of valuable time building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that fails to meet expectations when launched. A founder cannot release an MVP into the market in the hope of getting it right and iterating based on feedback. If the product has no customer need or for which solutions already exist, there is no scope for growth. While founders may be eager to launch their business, it gives them a false start. A startup founder should calculate the market size and conduct thorough market research to understand the target audience, the challenges they face, and whether they are seeking any solutions. Secondly, they should evaluate the competitor landscape to determine if their solution is the best one in the market. Once they have the research backing their idea, they can build an MVP to test market conditions.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the foundation of successfully starting a business is rarely based on building the most innovative or technically advanced product, but rather on three corporate identity pillars: strategy, culture, and brand image. When these pillars are aligned, they provide clarity not just to the organization but to all stakeholders. To drive sustainable growth, founders must embed these pillars from the very beginning. Tools like the Business Model Design Space, the Culture Map, and Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle are powerful instruments that help founders design ventures that are relevant and resilient. By utilizing these tools and ensuring clarity and purpose from day one, startups can avoid common pitfalls and lay the groundwork for long-term profitability, team cohesion, and a brand that people genuinely care about.
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