There are a lot of myths about startups which can impact a business proposal to many extends and eventually hold back the entrepreneur from reaching their goals. Here are 8 myths you need to prepare yourself for.

Generally speaking, when a new idea keeps up in the trending rallies, a lot of people may find it interesting to try the idea on their ends at least for once. However, entrepreneurs are using the idea for startups for a long time and actually as soon as the human being considered business associations, startups were shaped as the main candidate for a business formation among the other options. And a quick flashback to the successful industries and businesses in the history unveils this very true fact that startups are as old as business formation in the human being’s history. But a trigger or a special event is needed to get a previously formed idea on the rallies; the “dot-com” bubble can be the one in charge for startups.

In late 1990’s and beginning of 2000, a lot of new corporations and companies started to form their entities on the internet, hence bubbled the tech orientation thingy on an enormous growing speed. As soon as some of them got to the point and could catch big portions of the market with very small equities on the very beginning of their formation, others started to think, “hey, why don’t we do that too?” and this was the time “the turning point” shaped for startups!

Anyways, we can understand that startups are trending now and they are highly considered by almost all entrepreneurs all around the world and when this is the case about an idea, a lot of myths may come alive which can impact a business proposal to a lot of extends by negative outcomes by holding back the entrepreneur from reaching their goals. Let’s take a look at the myths in the rest of the reading:

Myth Number 1: Follow your PASSION and SUCCESS follows you!

It’s really great to chase a goal with passion, but the fact is “Do all other people have the same level of interest in your goals as you have?”. Passion is a great internal and personal motivator but it is not all the thing you need to succeed; you need to obtain many other tools in your inventory before you can travel the road to success.

Many different studies have been performed to understand the reasons behind the failing startups that were leading in a passionate manner by their owners, and most of them colluded that owners had set up “passion” as their business genesis. So please, reconsider your idea before starting your startup to see if it has enough capacity to solve a problem in the real world? If yes, then you HAVE to chase your goal with PASSION!

Myth Number 2: Innovation is the King

Maybe this is the trickiest scenario to form a startup because this is almost a conditioned thought that to be innovative guarantees your success. In other words, a majority of startup runners think they need to have a wholly brand new idea to grab their cake-piece from the market. But if you are serious about success, you got to pass on the idea immediately.

Google was not the first search engine on the internet and Apple was not the first who brought smartphones, mp3 players or wireless networks to the scene. All successful startups, take an existing idea or product and simply make it a better and even great-to-work product.

So as far as running a startup concerns, being innovative definitely means to follow the footsteps of an existing successful idea and after understanding their weak points, innovate a solution to overcome that specific leak.

Myth Number 3: Your startup should take over all of your time

You may find it a hard time to resist the desire to work day and night for your newly formed business! You may even believe that success needs a 24-7 presence at the business site. But the fact is that we work to enhance the quality of our lives and if the business dominates our time, it means we are rushing to the subject and red flags of failure will gradually start to show up on the go.

This myth evaluates the burning out process to be vital for success while the fact is that you need to stop periodically and take a breath; we need to work on schedule and rest enough. Besides daily hours we dedicate for personal and family associations, we need some break times to recreate.

Myth Number 4: Your startup is Secured by Hype Funding

I bet that at least 90 percent of the startup owners claim lack of money as their main obstacle to start and run their startup business in Iran. The fact is that money is not the main roadblock for your goal achievement process and rising bulky funds for your business won’t guarantee your position in the market.

A case study for two similar photo sharing apps digs deep into the fact though: COLOR and Instagram. They started with more than $40 million and 40 employees at COLOR, but burned all the capital in a year leading the project to a whole fail. But “Systrom” and “Kreiger” were the only Instagram employees at October 2010 where their app had 80 initial users; however, they could grow their startup gradually and made it a $1 billion deal with Facebook when they had over 30 million users and just owed some $77 million to their investors!

Myth number 5: Boost your social media followers for a better market presence

Try to focus on your products’ performance, instead of spending your resources, either being money or time or energy, on boosting up the number of your followers on the social media platforms. I can understand that unfortunately, some younger entrepreneurs in, especially in Iran, are investing a large number of their resources on social media presence before securing a product line.

When we are talking about a product line, we mean there must be a quality product with a successful presence in a target market and positive ROI. Actually, securing a product line is the main reason of a business.

Myth Number 6: Stick to your business plan, whatever happens on the go!

We all know without any doubt that a business plan or business proposal is one of the most vital tools before taking the leap and get hands on the experience. But one of the worst mistakes a startup owner can do, is being strictly stuck to their plan; flexibility is the key to success!

Many situations could be foreseen in a proposal, and many others are not predicted eventually. As a startup runner, we need to be flexible with the current situation and forget being tough-minded about our business plans. Sometimes, we might come up with a totally different approach for chasing our goals in the middle of our journey, which is natural. The important thing is not the business plan itself, but we want to get up there to the summit after all.

Myth Number 7: Customers’ needs are the same

Let’s remember that market research, market analysis and trending studies are the most important phases of a business development. A common mistake is to ignore various needs of customers in different locals for instance. If we fail to acknowledge the variation of our customers’ needs, we are actually embedding failure into our business that unfortunately will show off drastically, sooner or later!

Myth Number 8: Success is gained overnight

The most common mistake among young entrepreneurs all around the world and of course in Iran, is that they want to succeed overnight. We can hear a lot about ideas emphasizing on the speed of the process. In other words, they think that faster you can get to the point means more successful you are.

This is totally a myth! We cannot deny the fact that we are creatures encapsulated in time assets and as a resource, time should be cared for, but this doesn’t mean we should go after hype approaches. This kind of mindset, not only ruins our resources and endeavors but can lead to consequent failures and leaving the person embarrassed.

In the end, I want to remind that a startup needs deep market research to come up with a solution workaround over an existing business idea that has some problems. We want to find an existing good product or service that has some issues and get them solved through our business approach.