What are the simplified milestones and steps of a startup?

Here are a few steps apart from the steps described in the Image shared with the question :

1. Dream big and start small

If you are dreaming about starting your own company, but you don’t know exactly what it is you want to do or if it’s even the right time, use your time to study. Starting a fast-growing business is incredibly challenging, and requires a variety of skills. The time you take to study allows you to explore your talents and find the one thing you really excel at.

2. Work to learn, not to earn

Now that you’ve studied hard and really gotten deep into a particular discipline, it’s time to broaden your skill set. While it’s critical to become deeply skilled in one area of the business, the required skill-set to start and run a company is much more varied. Starting a business requires a strong sense for products, timing, trends and markets, which you can only acquire through experience.

4. Find the right location

If you rent a space in the centre of a startup hub, you will find it much easier to connect with like minded people and share ideas. It’s inspiring and motivating. If you are a first-time entrepreneur, San Francisco is most likely not the best city for you to start your company. The costs of living are incredibly high and you will compete with the world’s most successful tech businesses for talent. Then if you’re successful in finding them, you will spend more money for recruiting talented people than in any other city in the world. Luckily, San Francisco isn’t the only city in the world, there are other great places nowadays to start a business. New York, Tel Aviv, London, and Berlin are vibrant tech hubs too. Depending on your new business, location does matter. If you are an internet/software business, take care you pick a location that helps you to start.

5. Identify good and bad ideas, early

As founders we all have a ton of new product ideas, each and every day. Some of them sound promising, but only a few have the real potential to become a successful, fast-growing and highly profitable business.

6. Understand trends and markets

As an entrepreneur you start a company with long-term goals. You want to create something that stays and adds value to people’s lives, both your customers and your employees. The challenge is to balance the awareness for trends and momentum without making yourself or your product a slave of those. It’s like surfing. You can’t change the ocean, so you need to observe and read the water and get on your feet in the exact right moment to ride the wave.

7. Think like an athlete — Define your mission

Athletes always train with a clear objective, like participating in a competition, or more specifically winning it. If you want to be an entrepreneur, think like an athlete and define your own mission. Why do you want to build a business? What’s your main objective as an individual? What do you want your own career to look like in 30 years? Don’t be small-minded! Widen your horizon and think how you want to influence the people around you, and maybe even change the world. Define the purpose of your business, and you as an individual.

8. Prepare to fail, 95% do

You will experience unbelievable lows, including running out of money, or seeing important people leaving or shutting down a business you worked so hard for. Remember, that’s preciously your job. Being an entrepreneur means taking risks, because without that you will never be truly successful.

It’s important you understand the risks, and start managing them. If you blindly run into a new adventure, these lows will hurt much more than they should. The better you do your homework, the more likely your company will be able to survive.

9. Find the right co-founders and advisors

Starting a company isn’t easy. However, there is a way to help manage risks and to deal better with day-to-day challenges — and that is by having great co-founders. Having the right co-founders is incredibly important. You deal with them every day and you will fight, win and lose together. It’s hard to find them, because you will only know you’ve made the right choice, after you start or complete your adventure together.

10. Raise your first round of money, or bootstrap your company

There are two ways of starting a tech business. You either do it on your own, taking all risks and responsibilities yourself (“bootstrapping”), or you find investors that believe in your company. Both ways are great.

Working with investors, or without, are both challenging paths to starting your own business. An investor’s job is to provide assistance and guidance while at the same time challenge you. They need to challenge your way of thinking, your way of doing business, and your way of building products. Beware, it’s not always fun. If you don’t like to work with many different opinions, don’t do it. Investors can make your life much harder than it has to be, especially in tough times. But they can also boost your business into completely new dimensions, that you may not have even thought possible on your own.

When you start your first tech business, avoid the common mistakes. Don’t pitch too early, and don’t pitch to world-class venture capitalists before you are ready. Prepare a working prototype, showcase the product you actually want to build, or at least demonstrate that you are able to build it. If you want to get an investor on board, try to understand what investors care about — it’s mainly the team and the product. Most first-time entrepreneurs write huge business plans, instead of creating a short pitch-deck. Focus on building a prototype, test your business model and create a clear strategy to become a sustainable and scaleable business fast. Talk to investors when you are ready, not when you have something on paper — build up your story.

Before you start talking to large VCs, find some early stage investors. Stefan Tirtey, created this document with Berlin early stage investors.

If you raise money for the first time, you better understand the basics of venture capital. Brad Feld wrote a great book about Venture Capital. Still, raising money for the first time is difficult.

Another important factor investors care about is how the business is structured (like who owns what). I’ve seen a few businesses where the first investors took huge pieces of equity for very little money. Avoid making those mistakes and define a fair structure. While every business is structured differently, here is how I believe you should structure a tech business in Europe (as a first-time entrepreneur!):

15–20% equity for first investors

Depending on your team and the risk of the business, you should reserve 15% to 20% of equity for the first investors you get on board.

10–20% for employees

Be generous with shares to your employees, they are your capital and most important resource. But never give away shares without clear vesting rules.

60–70% for founders

60–70% sounds like it’s not a lot, but at this stage, at least 80% of the company are owned by the team — that’s a fantastic way to start.

Again, starting a business with investors may sounds “easier”, but it clearly isn’t. You just share the risks (and the outcome). If you decide to start something without an external investment, you usually start more carefully and slower with a lot less room for mistakes.

11. Learn how to hire and maintain your company culture

Determining who to hire is a powerful skill to have and it’s very difficult to learn. As a founder you need to develop this skill very quickly. You will make mistakes early on, and it’s vital that you identify them and correct them very quickly. Creating a sustainable, healthy and positive company culture in a fast-growing and fast-changing startup environment is tough, and many companies fail at it. Don’t go looking for good people for your company. Hire very junior people, many directly from college, or from their first jobs. You would quickly get an understanding on how much they understood their actual role, how fast they wanted to improve, and how badly they want to be successful.

The next big lesson you need to learn is to fire people. If you are a passionate entrepreneur, and you care about your team, firing is the hardest thing you will do. You will fire people for different reasons. Maybe they don’t fit, or they aren’t good enough (which means it’s your mistake for hiring them), or you need to reduce costs. Letting people go is emotional, and hard. People tend to cry, or get angry. Same goes for people who decide to leave, for whatever reason. Respect the decision, don’t stop a traveller (but try really hard to keep the ones who struggle), and always be professional. It’s a long road to learn those skills, but you will get there.

12. Prepare yourself to become a manager

The road from being a founder, to becoming a CEO or a manager is a very long and bumpy one. Most good founders somehow are crazy, in a good way. They often have ridiculous work ethics, are naive, and ignore what others say. They are often simply not the ideal person to work with. It rarely ends good if those founder attributes meet the pressure of a young company trying to survive.

13. Most important is to Find advisors and mentors to build your business

Mentors became crucial, They help us reflect and decide. Every time we’re not quite sure about the next step we should take, we ask for advice. Every time we need a partner to ping pong some new ideas, we ask for their feedback.

Mentors are a great way of widening your horizon when you start a business, and I believe every founder should have one or more. Actually, most successful tech entrepreneurs have incredible, experienced and strong mentors — Meet Behind-The-Scenes Mentors Of 15 Top Tech Executives.

The support of mentors most definitely save years of learning everything on your own. I’ve become a strong believer of mentoring.

When people talk about mentors, they often use the term “advisors” as well. There is no official explanation for it, but I would clearly define 3 different types of supporters you can add to your company:

Investors, Mentors & Advisors

Investors are often wealthy individuals or organizations who invest in your business, with the clear goal to have a great financial return. At the early-stage, investors are also often your mentors, but it can be hard to connect with investors as much as you can connect with individuals who respect you and are simply interested in your personal success. Investors are usually more interested in building and scaling up the business and less in your personal development.

Mentors are focused on helping you to grow as an individual and a leader. Mentors invest time in understanding your business and challanges and more importantly, in you. Especially as a young or first time founder it’s incredibly helpful to get mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs.

Advisors can add strategic value to your business (e.g. if you want to enter new markets or work with big corporations). They help you to understand networks, markets and try to advise you to make the right decisions. You can have advisors for every part of your business (like partnerships, or product, or marketing).

You can offer both advisors and mentors equity in exchange for support, but be careful not to create artificial interest. They should be interested in you and less in your company. They are not employees, but first and foremost they help you to succeed as an individual. At an early stage, be sure, he or she commits to at least spending some hours each week working with you. Advisors can be very helpful, there is no guarantee. Choose them carefully. Make sure they deeply care about your success.

14. Be ready for constant change

Constant changes in startups happens everywhere. You are constantly adjusting and optimizing internal processes, adapting your development strategy due to changing markets, modifying a fundraising strategy because of a financial crisis, replacing managers because of bad performances — this list just goes on and on and on.

Identifying changes in a market, and knowing when the time has come for a strategy shift becomes critical for any kind of tech business. Many startups fail because the technology stack doesn’t fit the requirements of the market, or because the key platform changed completely. Make sure to not only build your product in the most flexible and scalable way, but also invest time in creating a company culture that embraces change in order to use the full potential of your team, no matter what the new challenge is going to be. The more flexible you run your product and company, the more likely you will have a chance to win.

15. Work hard and be nice to people

Being mindful while maintaining just the right sense of urgency is incredibly hard. It requires a lot of experience to give people the freedom to learn and more importantly, to fail.

Our industry is full of young millionaires, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s very easy to meet people with bad intentions, people who don’t care about anyone but themselves. Define your personal values, think carefully how you want to be successful, and how you want to celebrate it.

Becoming successful will change your personality, either in a positive, or in a negative way — it’s your decision. When Steve Jobs got asked what his biggest weakness was, he answered: “I think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance, which knocks on your door whenever your are successful