Fraser Doherty: 48 Hour Start-Up

Fraser Doherty

Fraser Doherty founder of SuperJam, Envelope Coffee and co-founder of Beer52 started on the road to entrepreneurship early. Aged 8 he was selling eggs and by 12 he’d moved onto bacon, at 14 he launched SuperJam and since then hasn’t looked back!

Having learnt many lessons along the way, Fraser has put his knowledge to the test to see if is possible to start a business in 48 hrs.

Fraser’s new book, 48 Hour Start-Up, released next week, is crammed with great advice for anyone looking to build a new business, as well as supplying sufficient tools for current startups too.

We caught up with Fraser to find out how he got on with this new startup and find out what advice he would give to anyone wanting to start a business.

Create a business based on your interests and beliefs

If you don’t enjoy what you’re promoting, then how effectively are you going to pursue a successful business career? Being passionate about your business is the best way to enable it to reach its full potential, as you, the founder, will be able to convince people into buying into your idea as your desire will shine through. Not just for the success of the business, but also yourself, you need to be able to develop a business around a subject you won’t get tired of; otherwise eventually you will begin to decrease the amount of effort you put into making it work.

Don’t stress about perfecting your idea before going ahead with your business

If you spend so much time trying to create the perfect product, you are missing out on business opportunity and valuable customer feedback. Feedback you can retrieve through taking the minimum viable product option can help develop your idea and allows your customers to witness your progression. As well as this, if you take on board their advice, they are likely to buy into your idea as you are clearly taking them into consideration from working with thoughts and suggestions.

Use your competitors as your free research and development department

Rather than seeing them as purely a threat, use them to save time by not replicating the mistakes that they may have previously made. By doing this, you can essentially skip a stage within your development as you will have already witness what works well for them and what works/worked not so well. It is advised to not primarily take into consideration the competitors, but to more solely set your focus on the customer because at the end of the day, the customer is going to be the one to buy your product.