Best bets for startup success

You’re absolutely convinced you want to start your own business. You can’t be talked out of it. You have an endless supply of money to develop your product and provide working capital and you are about to embark on the single most difficult thing project will ever tackle. Now that you’ve decided, how do you avoid being among of the 80 percent of startups that fail?

A recently posted Business Week article offered ten tips for would-be entrepreneurs. With the help of The Illusions of Entrepreneurship author Scott Shane, “A Better Way to Start a Business” outlined some odds-increasing strategies for new venture creation, paraphrased below.

• Pick an industry with a high rate of success, even if this moves you outside of the industry in which you traditionally worked.
• Evaluate several ideas and pick the best. Don’t be among the 42 percent of business founders Shane says decide to start a company before they develop a product idea.
• Be a team player. Don’t try to start your business alone.
• Sell to other businesses, a process far easier than the multi-million dollar undertaking to break into consumer markets.
• Start your marketing efforts early to line up buyers and get feedback from customers while developing your first product.
• Focus on a single product and market. You’ll wear yourself out trying to sell every invention you’ve ever had to every customer who might ever buy.

Read the full list with Shane’s comments at BusinessWeek.com.