Startups, do these 5 things before working with a corporate

By
Nish Kotecha

For fellow startups out there, perhaps 2022 is the year you'd like to scale your operations and consider working with a corporate.

During my 30+ year career, I have worked on both sides of the fence, initially as an investment banker (with the likes of BZW, JP Morgan and Lehman) and more recently as a tech entrepreneur with Finboot amongst others.
Gaining an understanding of both sides of the fence proved invaluable when the time came to engage with bigger companies. While it remains a challenge and one should always prepare for the unexpected, my advice for startups planning to approach potential corporate customers would be to look carefully at these five areas:

  1. Who is your corporate sponsor?
  2. Prepare for an extended timeframe
  3. Research how the corporate makes decisions
  4. Make sure your product or service works or fix it fast if it doesn’t
  5. Test your hypothesis

This article first appeared in Sifted, which you can read in full here.