How can you adapt your startup methods to any industry?

Entrepreneurship methods are designed to be adaptable, flexible, and agile. What sets apart good from great entrepreneurs is the ability of the latter group to think critically, focus on value creation (or problem solving), and absorb as much about the industry as possible, including but not limited to its history, current state, future outlooks, metrics, major trends, major players (and why they are where they are and what they do best and not so well), technologies, value and supply chains, and factors affecting change. Entrepreneurship is glorified as an art, but it is a systematic reduction of risk in an effort to create value, stand out, and establish a foothold against the wishes of competitors and substitutes.

After having worked with Japanese top Management it was an eye opener that not only the entrepreneur but every employee works on ongoing innovation on a consistent basis.The focus is to build on several innovative practices that enhances the success probability in the business goals, executing corporate goals set by the management. Another thing I noticed was Japanese are very self reliant and enjoy even doing housekeeping, to supporting employees, emulating good work ethics, taking the tough decisions, working with stability in chaos. These are traits and best practices to incorporate as entrepreneurs as well as all employees who are working in the corporation.

10 FAMOUS INNOVATIONS USING LEAN STARTUP 1. Dropbox: used lean to develop its cloud storage product. 2. Airbnb: used lean to test market demand. 3. Instagram: followed the lean startup principles of building a MVP. 4. Zappos: rhe online shoe retailer, employed lean to test market demand. 5. Slack: a collaborative workplace platform, was built using a lean approach. 6. Groupon: the popular deal-of-the-day website used lean to validate its business model. 7. Squarespace: a website building platform, utilized lean to refine its product. 8. Buffer: a social media management tool, developed its product using lean. 9. GitHub: a web-based platform for collaboration employed lean. 10. Lyft: the popular ride-hailing app, used lean.

Lean start-up may not necessarily work well for all industries and at different levels of maturity in product development. However, lean start-up as thinking about customer need to solve problems is possible to adapt to most industries. Applying lean start-up or other agile methods comes out of the idea of not completing an innovation or product development process without checking with the market first to avoid not achieving product-market-fit. In those contexts where a traditional market exists, being agile is therefore crucial.

Validation is all about having a strong understanding of risk. Start with making a list of assumptions you have about your business. The best way to prioritize them is in order of what is most likely to kill your business if you are wrong. Run experiments to de-risk these decisions. A good amount of entrepreneurs fail to de-risk key things like who specifically their customer is, willingness to pay, genuine demand, and whether a problem they are focusing on is actually painful enough to build a business around.

There are many pathways to test and validate your idea. First would be to have paid customers after maybe giving a free trial. It's better to start with a mix of free and premium versions. Second, an excellent tool is to look for prestigious partnerships. Third, if you are building an EdTech get high quality material backed by some excellent research. Be original. Fourth, build on network effects through interviews with leading social change makers. Get testimonials from your customers or audience. Launch an MVP and get regular feedback. You can look at cohort analysis but again read a bit more about it.

One of the most important learnings we did when beginning to offering our hr tech platform to the education sector came from inviting multiple users to sit down together in one room and talk about how they worked with their processes. Not only did we get to align procedures that could work for many users at the same time, it offered a broad perspective on the recruitment process from a distinct user group. From that, we could create a backlog and involve the Scrum team to prioritize the work load as to get the most crucial functions in place in the most efficient way possible. A great team work consisting of both customers and in-house experts that opened up a new market for us where we could become the number one supplier in the market.

I would say get an excellent VC or accelerator behind you. Focus on B2B, build partnerships, be global yet local, leverage technology to expand the business market segment.

Scaling a start-up can only happen when the firm is ready for it. Before we started scaling we made sure we had procedures and routines in place to actually be able to add more people to our team, offering a smooth onboarding process, having a management team onboard, and making sure we had what is often referred to as product-market-fit. We also invested in a quality management system to make sure we had the necessary routines in place for fast growth. We have grown consistenly for nine straight years with at least 20% annually, some years double that. Scaling is about being ready. Having the right amount of structure and being open to change at the same time. Making the organization focusing on sales throughout is key.

One often overlooked way to scale and grow your business is through mergers and acquisitions. Pursue mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to fuel growth by targeting synergistic partners and conducting thorough due diligence. Prepare an integration plan, communicate transparently and stay agile to overcome challenges and unite businesses for long-term success.

Always keep your eyes up and scan the world around you. In everything we do we are engaged and interacting with the world around us. Developing a new product? We've cone customer development, experimented, prototyped.....and down the street someone is steps ahead and what they are doing will instigate change that impacts what we want to do. Go to local meetups. Go to regional and national meetings and spend lots of time talking to people. And READ! Industry-specific pubs as well as other pubs to inform you on what's happening and what's coming. For leaders: your job is to spend more time outside and looking outside to understand and interpret data coming in, asking the question: what does this mean for us?

What has been the most important effort of the founders of Varbi has been the constant wish to do things better day after day. Working hard to turn every stone and improve every detail. It is time consuming and sometimes it is hard to see the progress. But resilience and focus on details has been the succes recipe for our Saas business. The company grew from 0 to $3,5 million in ARR over the course of 14 years before getting acquired. Again, resilience was key. We needed time to scale.