If you are looking to really make the most out of living the west coast dream in California, then the odds are high that you will want to consider launching your own startup. Especially if you are a fan of computers or have a great idea for how to really better society with technology or a certain app or piece of software, you may find like-minded individuals in Silicon Valley or other areas of the West Coast to collaborate with.
Of course, starting your own company requires more than just a good idea in order to really attract the right team members and ultimately be able to perform at your highest ability. When it comes to finding lasting success in business, you need to have the right platforms to build your company—from tools that improve employee productivity to different ways of managing your cybersecurity. Narrowing down these sorts of platforms can be difficult, though, so here are a few ways to find the right platforms for your company.
Take a look at what your competitors are doing.
One of the best and easiest ways to find new platforms to build your company on involves looking at your competitors. While it’s easy to see what other competitors are doing on the open market, it might be less possible to see what technology they’re using without some digging. This is why it’s a good idea to head to Google or another search engine in order to see what sorts of hard and soft skills they expect from job applicants. Often, this can key you into different software tools that they use as part of their day-to-day workflow.
It’s also worth reading what some of the bigger companies are doing. If you really want to find success as a new startup, for example, you may find that a business like Google has attributed a lot of its success to using something known as the OKR framework or OKR methodology. OKR stands for objectives and key results and is a goal-setting framework that can really supercharge your organization no matter what industry you’re in.
When you use OKRs as a company, you start by defining what objective you want to achieve and then determining what key results will allow you to actually achieve that goal. One of the biggest benefits of using OKRs is that you are able to align all members of your team regardless of the departments they work in towards one shared common goal. This can help you reach new heights of productivity and also help you better handle performance reviews since an employee’s performance can be measured against how they’re stacking up in the OKR platform.
Attend tradeshows and conferences to stay on the cutting-edge.
Another way to find a good platform for your company is to go to trade shows or attend virtual conferences. Being able to do this kind of reconnaissance work doubles as networking, too! Of course, it’s always helpful to set up another meeting with a company that provides interesting technology should you really want to use it, since having a one-on-one demo with the provider of any platform is the best way to really ensure that all of your questions about it are answered.
That being said, there’s nothing wrong with attending these sorts of trade shows as they are a great way to do a lot of comparisons within one sector and narrow down your top three or four choices to request a deeper in-person demo in the future. As a form of information gathering, being able to chat to multiple people on the same day is ultimately a lot more engaging than performing Google search after Google search, too.
