Why You Should Be Aggressively Aggressive as a Startup

The world is going hyper these days and being good or the best at what you do is no longer enough to guarantee success in the business world.

Entrepreneurship is all the rave with the combination of the ease and access to information that the Internet provides, scarcity of jobs in most countries and the existence of so may success stories inspiring young people in particular to start their own businesses.

According to Neil Patel, Co-founder of Kissmetrics, 90% of startups fail and the reasons are not difficult to identify; poor market analysis, bad investment decisions, poor recruitment, poor product development -- the list is almost endless.

If you manage to become part of the 10% that succeed, you should really not celebrate much because your journey and the challenges have just started. Yes, you might have a product that is selling well or fast-growing revenue but the problem is that people are noticing your progress and want it for themselves.

Therefore, you really have to begin to aggressively run your aggressive expansion plans. Your rivals have an advantage; they know the business is profitable and are likely going to have better financing to start and roll-out with.

A very good example is Uber vs. Lyft. Uber is a transportation network company established in 2009 that has a smartphone app with the same name. This app allows users to submit a request whenever they need a taxi, a pool of car owners that have registered to provide taxi services get notified and one of them will come pick you up.

Uber's success has been rapid, disrupting conventional taxi services in the cities it operates to the detriment of taxi drivers. As at May, 2015, the service was available in 58 countries and 300 cities worldwide.

Of course, this success has attracted competitors and they are increasing at a fast rate. Uber's rivals include Lyft, Sidecar, Ola Cabs and Haxi. Of the 4, Lyft has emerged as the biggest rival for Uber, a Wall Street Journal report in 2014 tagged it 'tech's fiercest rivalry'. The 2 have been undercutting and poaching each other's drivers.

This example makes it clear that in the modern world, it is not enough to be aggressive as a successful startup, you have to be aggressively aggressive! Innovation and the implementation of strategies have to be quick and without hitches for you to continue to be successful.

It is great to be a successful startup but your long term viability is largely dependent on your realization that you have to transform into a successfully established brand as quickly as possible before your rivals make this impossible or very difficult indeed.