Startups Should Focus

The definition of a startup means you have very few resources to employ and little time to get them to do something valuable. The clock is always ticking, and the money (if you even have any) is running out by the day. With so little to leverage, you need to make sure that the focus of your company’s product offer is as razor sharp as possible.

Don’t be all you can be. Be as little as you can be.

Most startup companies fail because they try to be too many things to too many people right from the onset. They think of every possible option they could load into their product offer. While this may give them the feeling of being one of the “big boys,” the grim reality is they are not. In fact by trying to be too many things from the start, these companies often end up delivering no real value at all.

Instead of trying to be all things to all people, try being one thing to all people. Think of PayPal, the highly successful startup that allowed users to e-mail money over the Internet to each other. PayPal could have chosen a million options for their offer. They could have become an on-line credit card company, an auction site, a loan provider and so on. But what made the company successful was their focus on only one offer – e-mailing money from one person to the other.

PayPal did one simple thing so well that the industry giant eBay purchased them for $1.5 billion in 2002, even after eBay had already built the same service themselves. PayPal is a great example of a company keeping a sharp focus one doing on thing right even when so many great opportunities could have easily distracted them.

Bite off less than you can chew

Delivering your product to market is an amazing feat to begin with. Even still, a common problem among small companies is their inability to predict what it will take to actually support a product once it has gone to market. It’s easy to conceive complex products with lots of features. But actually bringing that product to market and supporting its use with customers is a whole different story.

Instead of trying to roll out everything and the kitchen sink in your approach to market, just roll out the sink. If you find that you can support your product just fine after it’s been successfully selling in the first year, then go ahead and add to it. It’s a lot easier to add features along the way than it is to support features you don’t have the resources for to begin with.

You have ten seconds to get it right

Your customer has a life, even if you do not. They are being constantly bombarded with marketing messages from the latest movies releases to the newest type of shampoo. They don’t have the time or energy to stop their entire day to focus on just your product. So if you are lucky enough to have ten seconds of their attention, you had better make good use of it.

The exercise of developing your value proposition in ten seconds is a great way to distill down your feature set to those items that will get people’s attention right away. If it’s not going to add value to the ten second pitch, it’s not critical to your product’s success. If you can’t get your customer’s attention with the one key benefit to your product, the rest of your features will never see the light of day to begin with.

Stay on target gold leader

Your product launch is just the beginning of keeping your focus. Once you have brought your product to market and enjoyed some early success, it may become even harder to stay focused. Now you have customers calling you and recommending (or demanding!) features to be added and services to be provided. All of these distractions make it even harder to keep you and your team focused on a single goal.

Fortunately the process of keeping your resources focused post-launch is entirely the same. You need to pick your battles and allocate your resources toward the few initiatives that will be best served to do the one thing right that is truly driving your company. Serving the needs and whims of every customer sounds great, but it can also be a terrible detour when trying to keep the forward progress of your company moving.

If at any point during your journey you’re unsure whether or not you’re spending your time and resources effectively, just ask yourself one question, “Is this driving the core benefit of our product?”. If the answer is “yes”, you’re headed in the right direction.

About The Guest Author

Wil Schroter is a serial entrepreneur, author, and public speaker. His latest book “Go Big or Go Home” was available in 2005.  Will is the founder of Go Big Network.

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Thanks to Will for this article. What do you think? Should a startup be absolutely lazer focused? Getting your feedback would really help us to focus in on what you want to see. What is your one question on startups today?

Consider joining my email list for more startup tips and help.

Andrew

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As the CEO/founder of three companies in the United States and the United Kingdom, I’ve developed a deep appreciation for the challenges and joys of being an entrepreneur in various countries. Myfirst company, X-IT Products, was named one of United States ‘Top 10 Start-ups in 1999′ by a top Entrepreneurial magazine.

I came up with the idea for the World’s Smallest, Safest, Strongest Fire Escape ladder and brought it to market with Kevin Dodge and Aldo DiBelardino.

Here’s a video about the company and the experience…I decided to move on after the battle but Aldo stuck around…

Let me know what you think….

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I don’t know the answer to this post yet or really understand where it will go but perhaps, through the act of writing it…I’ll figure out the right answer.

So…what’s the question?

You have started a business….Yippeee!  It’s the earliest days of a new baby venture.  So here’s the question – when do you stop what you are doing and determine what kind of business you want to build?

Maybe that sounds like a stupid question to you – maybe you want to create a products business, a software company, a recruitment agency – whatever your heart tells you to go out there and build. But that isn’t quite what I mean…

What I mean is – what are the core values of your company?

Core values – what are they?

Good question Batman – my personal definition (and I’m sure everyone has their own…) is the core values are those beliefs that help to structure the culture of your business and how it treats its employees, its customers, partners, the locality it’s a part of and perhaps, even the world.

And the second part of my question for you and myself too is ‘Can a company afford to have strong core values until its has cash in its bank account?’

Does a business have a responsibility to have a strong set of core value no matter what or is it all about the money at the beginning?  I.e. is it possible, smart or insanity to be concerned about being ‘Good’ when you have little money coming in to survive?

Is it only the rich who can truly afford to support a charity or do we all have to do what we can?  If you are starting a business, do you start off with little core values…maybe recycling the coke cans or do you go for the Big, Hairy, Beastie Core values and hope they don’t tank the business? Do core values have to have a negative effect on a business or are their important principles all businesses can adopt that should be core to their culture no matter what? If so – examples please…

Do you business have core values in your business? And if so, are they just words on a page or do you and everyone in the company live by them? How do you make sure that happens? Really….how?

If you were to start a business, when would you create your core values and when would you implement them?

My hope – my personal hope, is that I would have the smarts, the conviction and the courage to create them from day -1 but if I cared passionately about the business – I don’t know how I would do actually living them…especially when the shinola started to hit the fan…

As an example – I’ve thought about being a vegetarian – but as long as bacon sandwiches with HP sauce exists – that will never happen. So I could have the principles, but living by them is a near impossibility for me.

Can core values pay for themselves through your market or does it never really pay off?  Any examples anyone?

I wish I had the answers to this one – all I know is that core values are important to creating the right culture…but if you don’t survive then neither does that oh so good culture. The trick…if there is one…is probably to find a way that they are not mutually exclusive.  Is that possible or just wishful thinking? Should companies, like people, have a higher purpose?

Can a startup afford to have core values or can it afford not too?

This is one posting where input would be extremely appreciated…

Bacon Sandwich with HP sauce

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When you start a business, the odds are against you.

Huge swaths of new businesses don’t get past their first Anniversary – not one candle on the cake to be blown out.

And it doesn’t matter how great your business model is or how passionate your first few customers are – much of the early success of a start-up can be put on the shoulders of a company’s early founders – you have to be passionate, driven, nearly manic – sometimes to the exclusion of what most would consider logical or any degree of common sense. Even people that love you (the girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands and parents) will not be shy about telling you how crazy you are and how unlikely it is that you and your baby business will be anything more than a complete and abject failure.

And despite it all, you, the founder need to have a supreme confidence, deep in your gut and your chest – even when almost everything (and everyone) seems stacked against you.

Any of this sounds familiar?

Now here’s the one caveat when it comes to being passionate and confident, manic and closed minded about your new business – Be Confident, Not Stupid.

Huh?

Let me explain what I mean…

Be confident, know that some way or another, you and the people that decide to come on this startup journey with you will overcome the challenges and obstacles until you create something of which you can all be proud.

Did you notice the most important element of that sentence?

“…you will overcome the challenges and obstacles…”

Being the founder of a startup is NOT ignoring the weaknesses in your own business, it is not being blinkered and unaware of the challenges and the obstacles – I’ll write that again – being a founder is not being blinkered and ignoring the obvious issues, if anything, it’s being SO self aware that you know exactly what the business suffers from…even more so than all those nay Sayers on the outside who are telling you, you’re going to fail. You know even better than those doomsters, just how close you are to failure and what you need to focus on to be able to overcome these challenges and obstacles.

So, as a founder, be passionate, be focused, even be a little blinkered – just as long as you are self aware and know exactly what you need to do to take a potential catastrophe and convert it into a real business. Like I said in the beginning –

Be Confident…Not Stupid!

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Bumble bees are not designed to fly. 

Supposedly, it’s body is too big and its wings too small to keep it vibrating in the air.

How ever you look at a Bumble Bee…it shouldn’t be able to get where it wants to go, unless its prepared to walk. But, stop working on your startup for a few moments and look outside and during these bright days of summer, you’ll see small miracles occurring all around you.

Start-ups are not too dis-similar from this humble but miraculous insect…you start a business and in the beginning its little more than a concept in the heads of a few people. In fact, its probably not well designed to do what its supposed to do either – and do you know how you get where you want to go?

Every day you make incremental gains, small beats of fragile weak wings trying to raise an entity into space…and you keep beating those wings, until you get some momentum.  In fact, in the very very beginning you don’t even really have much in the way of wings.

In the beginning…and here’s a small secret…you fake it!

But even though you do fake it, you still believe one day you’re going to fly and one day, those slight wings make the body shake, they cut through the air just a little bit better than moments before and then they get some small degree of strength until, to your and everyone elses surprise, you don’t need to fake it anymore – you beat against the air and then…one day…

…You’re FLYING!

Bumble Bees and Startups

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