Got your seed funding? Here’s the straight talk on what to do next

You’ve developed your product and found a market for it. You’ve even found some seed funding, and are raring to take on the world.

But then you realize you may have walked through the looking glass. The clients are suddenly more demanding, you have to grow your team fast to keep pace and even investors have set up high parameters of delivery. What was merely a challenge when you were starting off with your business idea is now giving you nightmares and you are at a loss of how to build your idea into a business.

As the tech ecosystem hits maturity, there will be a rise in the number of startups that find themselves in that situation, where VCs get more demanding and so do clients. And while early stage angel investors are good enough to hold founders’ hands in the initial days, scaling up to build a bigger business will be the ask of the day in 2016 and beyond.

That is the gap accelerator Microsoft Ventures is filling, as it coaches late stage startups on how to crack the world of business. Director Ravi Narayan and mentors Raghunandan G, founder of TaxiForSure (now a part of Ola), and TCM Sundaram, managing director of IDG Ventures India, talked to Tech In Asia about how to go about it. Here are their eight tips:

1. Learn to say no

Microsoft Ventures’ promise to startups and partners is that things that typically take founders about two years to do can be wrapped up within four months thanks to the accelerator’s platform of 150 mentors.

My personal experience is that you tend to say yes to everything.

But, the most important step towards getting there is to learn the art of saying no.

“My personal experience is that you [tend to] say yes to everything. One, you think you are capable of doing it, and secondly, you do it because you think otherwise you will lose out – be it the customer, be it the investor, be it an employee. Even if an employee asks for a hike, you think you can’t say no because that person will leave,” said Raghu.

“Learning how to say no is the single biggest thing that can help entrepreneurs.”

If you are an enterprise startup, there are added challenges. As clients start coming in, there will be myriad requests for customization. It is important to defend your product at that stage, said Sundaram.

“Otherwise you will have different products for different customers,” he warned.

2. It’s not just the transaction

3. Hiring

4. Violinist or conductor?

5. Reality-check yourself

6. Don’t undersell yourself

While overpromising can be a recipe for disaster, it isn’t smart to have myopic vision either.

7. Be strategic

8. Take the money