Ram wants to start his own business. But he has no idea how to go about it. Robert is halfway through building his awesome website and is eager to launch. But he has not figured out who would buy his services and how to market to them. Rahim wants some seed funding to test market and prove that his idea works. But he does not know how to reach investors. If you are like one of them, this book is for you.

One of the most often quoted statistics about startups is that 95% of them fail. This need not be true. This book brings out the possibility of changing this reality and flipping this statistic over its head, by showing how the startup success factor can be increased by 19 times, to 95%.

A very tiny percent of the world population even think of starting own business, which is the most significant economic activity which ensures that the rest of the people can get a job. Even lesser number of people actually takes the plunge and starts a business. It is very important to help, nurture and protect these dare devils who are willing to take huge risks to transform the way we live. This book is a small step to achieve that objective.

The book focuses on the impact of a right mentor in the early stages of a startup and how mentoring can tremendously increase the chances of success. Through multiple case studies and real life examples it will be demonstrated that a good mentor can change the direction and the fate of a startup in a very positive way.

Most of the startups fail in the idea stage itself, while still on paper. This is due to lack of research and also a lot of assumptions about what the customers want. While there is nothing wrong about improving an existing product or service, there has to be something more interesting for the customers to buy from us.

Another challenge comes in the form of a business model. Most startups don’t understand what this is. And most of them just assume that one revenue stream is good enough. Figuring this out is a major task in itself.

Next step is building a minimum viable product and testing it in the target market. This is another major confusion, particularly for the technical startups. They strongly believe that they have to fully build their product before they can talk to the customers.

Marketing is a black box for most of the entrepreneurs. While the market has been highly segmented, most of the startups want to sell to the entire world. In this process they forget that they have to start small, test the business model and then quickly scale up.

This book addresses all these issues and much more, with the intent to help startups and entrepreneurs.