Joe Gascoigne, founder at Buffer, offers up 10 lessons from my startup journey so far. There’s a lot to relate to and like in his advice.
In my own startup journey, I’ve been three months in full-time bootstrap effort, so not as far along as a guy who has a team and a revenue-generating product already. One thing I’ve had to tangle with is “What idea to pursue?” Joel’s “4 steps to a startup” starts with ‘start with an idea’. For many, the seemingly hardest step. Others fall into a deceptively simple trap – having too many ideas, not sure which ones to pursue and which ones to drop, and none of them ever the perfect idea, so do you keep searching? This is where Joel has some good insight:
A side point about ideas is that you will learn far more by being in the process of working on a bad idea than you will by waiting for the perfect idea.
I have to agree with that. Distilling my own “lessons learned so far” on an early-stage startup:
1. It’s okay and normal to have more than one passion, idea, and set of interests. (See Randy Komisar’s ‘portfolio of passions’).
2. What’s not okay is to be diffused or distracted by the panorama of possibilities. We have finite energy and bandwidth, and maximum focus requires minimizing the scope of what we take on. Take your portfolio of passions and ideas, and make one of them your main active project, but you can still think of those other ideas as side projects and inactive ‘on the shelf’ ideas. This way, opening one door doesn’t close other doors, it just leaves them on ice, for later. In my case, I pivoted when from my cloud-EDA idea, when I decided it was no longer Idea Numero Uno, and my other passion – education – is now the focal point of my efforts.
3. Many ideas are so-so, none are perfect, all have flaws. It’s only in working through them that you can really prove them out. So don’t worry if your idea is lousy, if you do Lean Startup right, it will change! Or as a commenter on Joel’s blog put it:
Anyways, 6 months into my first venture, I now believe that the testing and iteration phase is what a start-up is all about. The original business plans and projections are such a joke when seen retrospectively.
4. Originality in business models is overrated. If you copy a business model (as long as you aren’t copying technology), you’ve solved part of the challenge of the startup. For example, a freemium cloud-SaaS subscription-model for delivering software is no longer an innovation, but it works. It’s innovative enough if you apply that model to a unique customer, problem and application space. (Probably the best businness idea is a truly innovative solution to a well-known problem; tackling a ‘new problem’ or inventing something too novel might be harder to get traction.)
5. Customers are a stable configuration, and their problems are a bit less stable but consistent, while solutions are more changeable. Implementations are the least stable. For this reason, asking “Who is my customer?” is the first question to ask about any business idea. It’s also a good question to ask constantly as the business evolves: “Who is my customer? And what problem of theirs am I solving?” ( And i f you can’t answer that, what sort of idea do you really have? Ideas without customers are interesting science or technology projects, but are not startup business ideas.)
6. It’s okay to break the above rules and other startup rules as long as you learn something significant each day that moves you forward. A startup is a process of searching for a business model to turn into a real business; it’s by definition a learning process. What this means is that if you are learning (e.g. by failing) or succeeding, you are making progress. If not – then you are in trouble.