Unicorn Startup: How to Do It Right?

Unicorn in the startup world

Many startup owners dream of turning their startups into a billion-dollar “unicorn startup”. They want to make a fortune quickly, sometimes even quicker sell the work of their lives, and feel accomplished. It works for unicorn startups in Silicon Valley, Stockholm, and Toronto, but does it work at all? Look at Theranos and Uber.

CSHARK scales and invests in startups. The company also works with them to bring added value to clients. A good example is Arendai, our partner from San Diego, California. They build their company with care, having quality in mind. You should follow that way. The reason is simple – it will get you farther. Patience, consequence, and reasonable decisions are what make a startup thrive. The calm and responsible strategy doesn’t mean that you have to start slow. On the contrary, you should kick off the company with a bang, and technology can help you.

How to save time and money with microservices

Literally. A startup’s role is to put a product on a market as fast as it can. Investor’s money and patience are not infinite. You need to create a proof of concept (PoC) and a minimum viable product (MVP). That requires a level of flexibility, especially in the software department, where business and functional requirements can change on the spot and the team will need to swiftly make a pivot.

Pivots are dangerous. You make a 90 ° turn, going away from what you already know, shifting the company efforts. Flexibility can make or break a project, even the entire company. Especially microservices, flexible and reliable architecture. Microservices guarantee:

• Performance
• Easy recomposition and reconfiguration
• Native support for cloud-based solutions
• High resilience
• Organizational alignment
• Composability

At CSHARK we value the impact technology makes on human lives. We put a human at the center of things, that’s why software product development should keep in mind multiple things – from UX/UI design to personalization. Even under the best conditions and with the best talents onboard, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where everything goes into place all the time. Microservices are not perfect. But they work. Microservices are great if you want to develop your project quickly. Therefore, they can help to save your company – on business and technology level.

Microservices let you focus on one technology stack while using them for effectiveness. You can also use different technologies for each part of the application. This is a plus when a client has its own API and your application has to ‘talk’ to it for pulling data.

Read more: “How Can Startups Scale Business Through Microservices and Processes”

More than money

This is where it gets interesting. Building a unicorn startup, despite what many young entrepreneurs think, does not prove your ability to make a business able to withstand an earthquake.

CSHARK invests in teams, ideas, and the work of people who we believe think long term and steadily build value over time. You have to care about providing the best products and services possible with your vision, mission, and talents already in place. Don’t think about making a billion-dollar unicorn startup company, all you need is a healthy and working firm that gives customers what they need. Provide value, not reasons to fill your pockets with money that are not backed up with solutions to real market desires.

Put your customer at the heart of what you do and make sure you can deliver. That’s why we offer MAKO – a rapid software development platform. We came up with this solution thinking about the impact time and money have on young companies. Technology can transform the way you do business but it’s not the main thing you should be focused on. Technology, like money, is just a tool. A means to an end, not a goal in itself. Overhyped unicorn startups with multi-billion-dollar values set a bad example for anyone who wants to follow in their footsteps. Increasing sales, acquiring users, and pomp the company’s name through traditional and new media work only for a tiny percentage of companies.

What startup owners should be focused on is called the viability of the product. And that’s all about managing the cost. You have to make sure your costs are manageable and the model of running a startup sustainable in the long run – not only until the next funding round.

More than unicorn startup

There’s really a lot more to life and making business than creating a unicorn startup before you’re 30, 40, or even 50. Sustainable development of your company should be the goal. You can achieve it when you realize that:

• Sustainability comes from solving real-life problems
• Solving problems comes from making innovations
• Implementing innovations requires the right team and the right technology partner
• To find the right technology partner you need to realize that mindset is everything

A lot of companies can make software. Very few of them can support you with your business and IT consulting. Think about your needs and what’s best for the company, then choose the right partner that will help you to achieve your goal. As I’ve said earlier, you can have it in months. Plus, look for a software development partner, that can also invest for the small percent of the shares and with that, boost your chances for market success. CSHARK treats a startup that invests in, as a member of the family, not a mere partner that benefits from our software. On top of that, you will get our project support. Money is not always the best solution for a new business. The so-called smart money, on the other hand, understood as a wide project and mentoring support, making the entire ecosystem, is. That’s a real value, it beats a mythical unicorn any day of the week.