If you’re a young entrepreneur thinking about starting your own business, get ready to experience various ups and downs. You may call them “difficulties” and “victories,” but the professionals and experienced businessmen know they are just typical stages of a startup.
How can a startup have any stages of the lifecycle if each business is unique?
This is what startup lifecycle stages are all about.
And such predictability means good news for you. Don’t disregard a startup idea as scary, complex, or unpredictable. Just take it and follow the checklist of prescribed phases. Moreover, remain patient, love what you do no matter what, and believe in yourself.
These are all the ingredients in a secret recipe that help any startup win.
What are the 5 stages of startups that prescribe the future of any business idea?
Each startup is a marathon with 5 pit stops that bring it to the next level:
Idea polishing,
MVP development,
Fitting product to the market,
Scaling, and
Globalizing.
Let’s check what’s going on on each stage.
1. Mental preparation for a startup
Everything starts with an idea — especially a startup. So, take the time to imagine your business in detail. What will you do? Whom will you serve? Why will these people need your product or service in their lives?
In essence, each startup is a solution to a specific problem. If your business doesn’t fix anything, it likely had a bad beginning. Thus, revise if you understand your purpose and context to be effective beforehand. Ideally, start your business by finding answers to these questions. Don’t throw your resources and time without need.
The next step after general theorizing is to determine your target audience. To survive, you should understand your buyers. So, as a startup founder, be passionate about getting acquainted with your clients closer and closer day after day. Use all the sources you can find: scientific research, posts on forums, official statistics, commentators in your competitors’ profiles in social media, in-depth interviews with your first clients, etc. Don’t stop until you define the customer profile to details.
The ultimate goal of each such inquiry is to dissect the customer pain — the individual problem that is sharp enough to possess an absolute value. Once you gain this precious knowledge, you have a solid ground to fly to the next stage.
The biggest mistake made on this stage: To start a business believing some abstract “people” will like your idea.
How to overcome: Learn your customers. Become their ardent proponent. Don’t stop until their image and their pains are clear to you. Learn what they eat for breakfast if it helps your business.
2. Developing the basic functionality for your service (MVP)
When you’ve collected enough evidence to put your ideas into practice, don’t get too excited and run into extremes. The second step is not about renting a penthouse for your office or hiring a massage therapist for your team. Before celebrating that you’ve found all customer pains, make a reality check of your hypothesis with an MVP. This solution is the best to track customer behavior in practice and reduce your risks to the minimum.
MVP not only validates the fundamental purpose of your business but also clarifies its critical technical details. Here are the top 5 tools you can use to test your hypothesis:
User interviews (when you ask which problems your first clients had with your product),
Landing pages with an explainer video (where you present your product’s features),
A/B testing (your best friend to understand which option among two variants users like more — especially if they can’t determine what they like by themselves),
Promotion campaign (use the complex statistical data from Google Analytics and Facebook to empower your insights),
Fundraising initiative (ask your users to vote for your service with their money).
To benefit from this move, use all the possible tools and gain a sufficient number of initial users. Invest in building a landing page and launching a crowdfunding campaign — these tools are the best to check the real demand.
The biggest mistake made on this stage: Develop your product without showing it to people.
How to overcome: Involve your customers on each stage of your product development. Value each piece of feedback received and use it as the direction for your work tomorrow. Activate all the metrics possible to know the reaction of your customers in detail.
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Once you’ve collected the fanbase of people who share your idea and are ready to pay for your solution, it’s time to optimize your product for the market demands. Don’t rush: the progress should be smooth and even slow. But don’t lose control over the situation by checking the retention rate metrics constantly.
Test everything: messages in social media, CTAs on your landing page, stages in the funnel. Pay special attention to distribution channels: you’ll inevitably have only a couple of effective platforms worth further optimization. Don’t be afraid to stop working in some directions.
The overarching goal is to notch off the unnecessary elements and polish up the effective parts. That’s where your business becomes a unique solution with all the necessary features to solve its market in the best way. Simply put, that’s how you uncommonly solve a common problem.
The biggest mistake made on this stage: Investing equal resources in every direction.
How to overcome: Concentrate on the best practices and the most effective channels. Work hard until every technical detail is polished, and your user base starts growing constantly.
4. Scale your business
As soon as you’ve become best friends with your target audience and have created the perfect offering, the time for scaling your business has come! To make a wise decision, critically evaluate the key strengths of your business — and hire top specialists to empower and expand them. Make sure these new people have everything to reveal their best: resources, budget, and operational autonomy.
Scaling your team is the best investment in the future. With the right people around, any task can be done — be it the new features in an existing product, the new offering, or a completely new project.
The biggest mistake made on this stage: Relaxing and thinking that the most challenging times are behind.
How to overcome: Don’t scrimp on specialists. Even if your team has already proved its loyalty in the previous stages, you have to find the best new people to delegate the management tasks and make your startup work in the long run.
5. Become an international company
After the successful completion of all the previous stages, you’re about to become an international company. Be brave here, the sky's the limit!
If you’ve reached the stars in your country, look for opportunities to expand abroad. Every new country guarantees new challenges, so you’ll never get bored! With around 200 countries in the world, you have 200 opportunities to build a startup on the same idea from scratch.
The biggest mistake made on this stage: Limiting yourself to your national market.
How to overcome: Never stop learning and challenging yourself. Launch each new country as a startup: research the target audience, develop an MVP, work hard to launch, and pick the best local team. Impossible is nothing — especially for startupers. Good luck!
Frequently asked questions about a lifecycle of startup
Are there any other classifications for startup phases?
Some experts avoid a 5-stage approach to a startup lifecycle. For some enterprises, only 3 stages out of 5 are relevant: idea, launch, and growth.
What is startup lifecycle strategy?
Basically, it’s the preparation for your business growth made on the first stage of the startup lifecycle. Some observers recommend picking the real expert to help you build the strategy — not only in terms of industry rules but also as an appropriate business model for your company.
For a novel businessman, strategizing the startup lifecycle can be really overwhelming. You risk getting stuck at Stage 1 and never move beyond plain theorizing. That’s why we recommend not overthinking about the preparation for the next stages. Concentrate on your target audience and call experts to learn their pains better only. Of course, you should get ready for different stages — but if you do everything smoothly and according to client needs, the growth process will happen naturally.
What is growth stage startup?
Growth is the stage where a startup can already scale and become internationalized. Basically, it’s another title for everything that happens with a startup after its launch.
What is startup funding?
Funding has a tremendous impact on all the stages of a startup if you launch your business from investment. It’s a good idea to attract venture capitalists or launch a crowdfunding campaign. Nevertheless, the increased number of funders means a higher level of responsibility.
Of course, a money problem is sharp for any startup. However, with the right approach and constant contact with your users, you can protect yourself from wasteful spending. For example, instead of hiring consultants to research your market, ask those ten people who already are your clients. In practice, a good in-depth interview with your users has already saved businesses lots of money and accelerated their growth.
We, at Intellectsoft, empower companies and their workforce with cutting-edge transformative solutions and data-driven insights. Are you and your organization ready to shift the mindsets and get the most out of innovations?
Talk to our experts and find out more about the topic and how your business or project can start benefiting from it today!
The hospitality industry depends a lot on keeping customers happy, but it’s getting harder to attract and keep them. The pandemic hit this industry hard, and now market competition is tougher than ever, with competitive offerings swaying customers. Hospitality businesses are willing to spend big to win customers back. The main questions for many are: how can we stay ahead of the competition, keep our customers, and increase revenue? Keep reading—we’ve got some answers.
Customers today have so many options that getting their attention is a real challenge. It’s not easy to make them choose your business over others. What worked 10 years ago doesn’t work the same way now. Back then, people often chose businesses based on reputation. But with new types of businesses (boutique hotels, craft cafes) popping up or big enterprises getting a new strategy, expectations have changed. The good news is these businesses have shown what works: great customer service. They focus on personalizing the experience, making things easy for customers, offering loyalty programs, and using smart technology.
In this article, we’ll explore these tech strategies and show you how they can help your business grow, and double the revenue. Keep reading to learn more!
The Importance of Customer Satisfaction in the Hospitality Industry
Customer satisfaction, which equals exceptional customer experience, is the backbone of the hospitality industry. It plays a central role in driving revenue and loyalty, as satisfied customers are more likely to return and recommend a hotel, restaurant, or other hospitality business to others. In fact, a study by the Harvard Business Review found that a 1% increase in customer satisfaction can lead to a 0.5% increase in revenue. Moreover, loyal customers are more likely to forgive mistakes and continue doing business with a company, even if they experience a negative encounter.
Let's quickly review the challenges the hospitality industry is facing right now so we can move on to the solutions and our case studies.
Challenges in Hospitality
As businesses navigate the changes in the hospitality industry, there are some key areas where a little improvement can go a long way. From improving customer service to embracing digital transformation and tackling labor shortages, we’ll take a closer look at today’s biggest challenges—and, more importantly, how technology can step in to help. Let’s get started!
Poor Customer Service
Even with strong and high-quality business offerings, poor customer service can drive potential customers and existing customers away. Common issues include:
Long wait times in customer service queues (it is worth remembering that our attention spans 8 seconds, and we live in a very busy world, so quick and efficient responses are more important than ever.)
Poorly trained customer service representatives
Lack of follow-up
Services not being done properly or quickly
Recall issues that require multiple service calls
These problems can frustrate customers. But, at Intellectsoft, we believe that the right approach, combined with technology, can address them effectively.
Digital Transformation Gaps
Approximately 50% of hotels are adopting new technologies, with 43% automating repetitive tasks and 39% upgrading existing systems. Source: workstaff.app
While many businesses are adopting digital solutions, some still struggle with outdated systems and fragmented data. Legacy companies often face chaos when trying to manage their data and create new systems or add features.
Some of the recent examples include clients coming to us to create AI solutions for their services while their data simply was not ready for the advanced tasks. We advise stepping back, communicating with a company objective, and working on keeping the data clean (centralized, structured, and segmented).
When we’re asked to create advanced systems using AI, we always emphasize the importance of organized data. To train AI and build such complicated systems that truly work, you need to start from the very beginning—collecting, storing, centralizing, and organizing it. We encourage our clients to align all departments to work internally on the data so we can create a unified digital system that delivers personalized experiences.
If you’re unsure where to start with your data, we can help. Collecting feedback at various touchpoints along the customer journey is crucial for gaining insights into customer satisfaction and loyalty. Book an IT consultation with us, and our experts will guide you in mapping out a path to get more from your data and build a system that works for your business and team.
Reskilling Staff
The pandemic hit hard in early 2020, especially for the hospitality and travel industries. Even five years later, many businesses are still feeling the impact. Recruiting and retaining skilled staff has become a major challenge post-pandemic.
Reskilling to address technology’s impact is of utmost importance, as about 40% of hotel General Managers place it among their top three workforce challenges.
We strongly believe that adopting the right technology can help. For example, creating an app to train your staff not only saves time but also ensures consistency in learning. AI assistants can also work alongside your team, helping with tasks like recruitment (providing industry insights, crafting emails) and staff training. Imagine having an app dedicated to making your team’s work easier and more efficient!
How Technology Tackles These Challenges and Supports a Customer-Centric Hospitality Culture
Automation, AI, and similar technologies may threaten many. However, the debate about replacing humans isn’t about that—it’s about cooperation and working hand in hand with technology to achieve the highest standards and establish brand-new “golden standards.” Technology is here to assist staff in listening to and collecting customer insights from data.
Let’s review some of our cases to see examples of how technology helps improve customer experience and supports customer service.
Examples of Intellectsoft projects
Property management systems (PMS)
We created a web platform and mobile app that makes managing daily tasks easier and offers extra services to improve residents’ experience. It gives a clear overview of daily activities and helps with managing units and users. Residents can easily book amenities, submit service requests, and report incidents. The platform also includes features for equipment management, key instructions, workflows, and custom permissions. This makes it easier for staff to stay on top of equipment and ensure residents have all the information they need. Plus, tools like announcements, quick votes, a forum, and a community calendar help build a connected and engaged community.
Guest Experience Management App
Our next app helped our client improve their guest experience by replacing printed marketing materials and the need for phone calls with a smart solution. Now, guests can easily order in-room dining, make reservations, and interact with staff— through a simple tablet in their room. The solution includes three parts: a custom in-room tablet with a variety of services, an admin panel for hotel staff and service providers, and a backend system that connects everything together. This approach makes things easier for guests and staff, improving both convenience and efficiency.
Existing Customers First: Building Loyalty with Personalized Touchpoints
Keeping existing customers is not just a strategy; it’s well-known that retaining existing customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. In fact, research shows that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. KPMG named customer retention as the number one revenue driver for the company.
Moreover, a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% to 95% increase in profits, showing the significant impact loyal customers can have on a business’s bottom line. Retention strategies, like personalized experiences and loyalty programs, can foster long-term relationships and generate recurring revenue, ultimately making them an invaluable part of any business model.
Personalization: How Technology Can Help?
Everyone loves to feel special—it’s part of being human. In hospitality, personalization has evolved from being a luxury to an essential standard. With the right technology to manage your data effectively, you can deliver those “wow” moments that guests won’t forget.
More than half of hotel chains are already using personalization features on their websites, booking platforms, and apps, and another 39% are planning to follow suit soon. They’re tailoring experiences to fit guest preferences perfectly.
Source: Deloitte
How does technology make it happen?
CRM Systems: They help you keep track of guest preferences, booking history, and special requests so you can offer services tailored just for them.
Loyalty Programs: Personalized rewards and offers show your guests that you value them, keeping them coming back for more.
AI Personalization: AI analyzes guest data to predict what they’ll love (from room upgrades to local recommendations) before they even ask.
IoT Gadgets: Smart room features like voice-activated assistants, or temperature controls adjust to your guests’ preferences, making their stay more comfortable.
With tech-powered personalization, you’re building loyalty and maximizing the lifetime value of every customer.
Our Case Study: Smart Hotel Management & Loyalty Program
For one of our clients, we created a smart room solution, complete with a custom IoT system. Guests can use a mobile app to control services, explore amenities, and find resort information-- with a special touch to their suite type. For the client’s entertainment business, we improved their legacy software by running a full IT and code check, fixing issues, and making the system better for customers.
Along with that, we developed a mobile app for the loyalty program, allowing businesses to effortlessly reward their customers and keep them engaged with exclusive benefits.
Our solutions not only helped the client with special experiences for guests; it also improved operations, cutting costs by eliminating inefficiencies. Here's what our experts shared:
"We transitioned away from ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) systems, which previously cost millions, and replaced them with more efficient, self-managed solutions. Similarly, we’ve implemented Device Farms that improved operations and saved resources."
Leveraging Software to Increase Upsell Opportunities
Here are some examples of tech tactics that will help your team sell more and introduce new offerings to existing customers, improve overall efficiency leaving your team grateful:
Dynamic Pricing Algorithms
For finance and marketing teams, manually calculating pricing by segment to introduce your clients can be incredibly challenging. AI-powered tools can strongly optimize these strategies by analyzing your database in detail.
Upselling via Apps
Boosting revenue in the hospitality business often comes down to personalized experiences. Imagine this: a guest books a room, and then your app suggests a spa package or a room upgrade at just the right moment. Later, it nudges them to book a dinner reservation or a guided tour designed to their preferences. With apps offering these personalized recommendations during and after bookings, you’re not just increasing your revenue per guest but also skyrocketing their experience. And you do it in a sustainable way, not by speculating, but by offering what your customers desire based on their previous experiences. It’s a win-win: seamless, helpful, and far from pushy.
Inventory and Resource Management Software
Making every resource count in your hospitality business is key. Inventory and resource management software allows you to effortlessly track everything from linens to room availability, ensuring nothing goes to waste. Having real-time insights to reduce overstock, avoid shortages, and optimize operations assists sustainably keep everything under control and know what you need to focus more. It helps maximize room occupancy by aligning bookings with available resources, ensuring every room and item is used effectively. This approach leads to smarter management, better guest experiences, and a noticeable boost to your bottom line.
Adopting these strategies not only optimizes your operations but also drives business growth. Ready to discover how technology can elevate your goals? We’re here to create a tailored solution for you.
Steps For Implementing a Customer Service Technology Solution
Improving customer service in hospitality doesn’t have to be a daunting task. With the right technology, you can smooth the path of your operations, speed up response times, and elevate the overall guest experience. Here’s where you can make it happen:
1. Understand Your Needs
Start by identifying the challenges your business is facing. Are you struggling to manage high volumes of inquiries, track customer feedback, or personalize the guest experience? Pinpointing your needs will guide you to the best solutions.
2. Pick the Right Tools
Choose technology that aligns with your goals. Look for solutions that are scalable, easy to use, and integrate effortlessly with your current systems. Options like CRM software, live chat tools, or a guest experience app can make a difference.
3. Equip Your Team
Technology is only as effective as the people using it. Train your staff to make the most of the new tools, so they can deliver exceptional service and resolve issues quickly. Confident, well-equipped staff creates happy, loyal customers.
4. Keep Improving
Once implemented, monitor how well the solution works. Are response times improving? Are customers more satisfied? Regular evaluations will help you fine-tune your approach and keep things running harmoniously.
Some Tech Ideas for Hospitality Businesses
CRM Software: Manage customer interactions and preferences.
Guest Experience Apps: Delight guests with personalized experiences right at their fingertips.
Amenity Management Systems: Simplify operations for everything from room service to facility bookings.
Live Chat Tools: Offer instant support and answers.
Social Media Management Tools: Keep customer interactions engaging and organized.
Integrating these strategies will not only improve your customer service but also deliver unforgettable customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, your bottom line. Ready to take the next step? Book a consultation with our experts.
Conclusion
To wrap up everything we've discussed, customer satisfaction and experience are at the heart of hospitality. Retaining customers is more than just keeping them around—building strong, long-lasting relationships and consistently meeting their evolving needs. By understanding their pain points and offering personalized solutions, you can inspire loyalty and drive progress. With the right technology and continuous improvement, your business can stay ahead, let go of what no longer serves you, and keep growing.
At Intellectsoft, with over 17 years of experience in software development, our expert team is ready to help. We create everything from mobile apps to full-fledged portals and systems, leveraging the latest technologies like AI, Cloud, and Machine Learning. With deep experience in the hospitality industry, we’re here to craft personalized solutions that bring your business unforgettable customer experience and retain your valuable clients.
Ready to double your revenue and level up your customer retention strategy with personalized technology? Contact our experts, and we look forward to working hand in hand with you to build or revitalize the perfect app or system for you.
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