How to start a business?

In my view there are a few points to be kept in mind.

1. You need to concentrate on a particular domain of customer.The reason is that when you go and offer someone a product, you will be tested on your experience, and more importantly experience in the domain.Let us see how domain experience helps. First, customer believes that you know his business logic clearly. Next, more you have worked on a domain, more easily you understand customers requirement, give him better options and deliver a better product to his business, happier the customer becomes. This gives you re-business easily, compared to case where you trouble the customer explain you his requirements again and again, you get them wrong, you do a rework and customer has an impression that you did not understand his business. Also, here you can not give customer a value add, customer will not accept your views readily, evan if they improve his business, once he gets a negative impression of your domain knowledge. So, domain knowledge is very important to get happy customers, and quality software with cost and time reduction. The best way to get is not reading a book on it but actually trying to implement it and getting continuous feedbacks from experts.

2. Choosing initial domain for work.It is very important that you choose the right domain and right customer initially. You should have a fair idea of his business and also such people should be available in a good number.Let us understand why and what are its advantages. As understood earlier better the domain knowledge, better the business. To sustain for a longer time we need to have a big potential customer base, bigger the potential customer base, richer you are after your product is having a good initial response. It is advantageous if you have or develop a personal contact with such people. Say, for a shop management software, it is good to have a number of shopkeepers as your close relatives, they give you a correct feedback of your product, best ways to improve it, and spread your good faith in your market, you get customers easily, what else you want? Also you can work with them closely to understand there business needs better.

3. Accepting your mistakes and more importantly learning from them.This is something everyone knows, but it is really very important to learn from your mistakes and make it a point you never do it again. Believe me; if you do the same mistake twice (you should be ready to accept initially you are bound to make mistakes... it is a human nature and quite difficult to escape from it.) that is the biggest misfortune for you. Rectifying second time done mistake from customer's mind is one of the most difficult task you will face.These points are quite obvious but putting a tough on these and doing a R&D further on these give you good ideas.