How Not to Kill Your Start-Up
Author: Greg Boutin
1. This one's obvious - watch your cash flow. Whether your plan is to fund your startup through investors or through revenues, plan ahead. Every other principle below flows from this simple one.
2. Spot a real problem and concentrate your efforts on solving it. Do not disperse your time among too many concurrent, unrelated pursuits.
3. Identify your target market(s) and collect market feedback early on. Seek to understand your prospects and customers through first-hand observation (how do they currently deal with the problem you are trying to solve?) and continuous inputs.
4. Design and develop a minimum viable solution as fast as possible. A minimum viable solution is anything you can extract a firm commitment from a potential client or investor with.
5. Surround yourself with dedicated, effective people. Build a small team and a pipeline of strong players, and nurture a circle of supporters with knowledge and/or financial resources. Incentivize everyone intelligently (if nothing else, respect can go a long way) and reward them fairly.
6. Read Crossing the Chasm. Appreciate the difference between early adopters and mainstream prospects. Know which one you target, and do not confuse technologies and products with whole solutions. Only offer whole solutions to mainstream leads.
7. Consider other sources of competitive power than just technological sophistication, e.g. superior customer experience or service, exclusive distribution partnerships, or other market-based advantages.
8. Have a plan for cutting through market noise. Know how prospects will hear about your solution. Understand that building a great product is required but rarely sufficient to build a great business, it needs to be marketed one way or another.
9. Invest time in selecting and testing a business model, and be open to changing it based on new learning. Choose one you are able to sell to investors if you go down that road (even if it is based on traffic only, à la Twitter, have a monetization model you can justify).
10. Be creative and resourceful in meeting your objectives. Seek cost-effective solutions, and do not give up in the face of adversity, but seek to learn and adapt your approach to overcome obstacles.
