What Works vs What Doesn't Work

Several years ago I wrote a post here on LinkedIn (republished from my old blog) a few years ago about "What Works; What Doesn't Work" in startups. I wrote:

"An important lesson I’ve learned while working at a Startup is to do more of what works and jettison what doesn’t work, quickly. That’s the way to success, the rest is just noise and a waste of time. This lesson can be applied to everything in life."

Although it was a short post, it's worth revisiting the ideas and the impetus for why I wrote about it then and expanding upon the topic. Why? Because I've worked in the Startup world now for nearly a decade and feel like a grizzled veteran.?

What separates a good startup from a bad one?

The ability the turn on a dime.

What separates a successful startup from a failed one?

Many small and overlooked details.

Think first then act

If there's one overall theme to this post it's this, you should always think first and then act. You should spend more time thinking before acting. If you have 10 seconds to think before acting or making a decision, take the full 10 seconds.?

While this bit of advice is valuable in all aspects of your life, it'll prevent you from painting your startup into a corner. Too many times startup founders and entrepreneurs race to the market with half-baked ideas and products that are really a feature.??

?Always think first, gather as much data as you can, and then decide.?

Community vs making money

Many startup entrepreneurs focus only on the community. Building your community should be one part of your strategy. The second part of your strategy should be to figure out how to convert that community into money or at least leverage the community into sales leads and sales.?

One of the best sales leaders I've worked for said in an all-hands meeting that "we don't work for free". He's right and finding the fine line between sales and community is important. The community will make you and the (lack of) sales will break you.?

You'll work to keep them both happy when you realize you have two big stakeholders, your community AND your customers.

Go-to-market strategy

What to keep your community and customers happy? A good go-to-market (GTM) strategy is what you'll need. Your GTM will need to be well thought out and flexible enough. It will need to adjust as the market conditions change but not in a drastic way.?

Depending on your industry and niche, your GTM needs to balance the right amount of enterprise features (paid) vs community features (free). If you do change up what's for free vs paid every few quarters you'll kill your community, customers, or both.?

It's not marketing vs sales

It's been my experience that market and sales groups have an adversarial relationship. They're "frenemies" a lot of times and it has to stop. Sales will blame Marketing for not having enough "collateral" to help close a deal and Marketing will blame Sales for not straying from the go-to-market strategy.?

While there may be passionate people in both groups, everyone has to remember we're in the same boat paddling in the same direction. A well-aligned Sales and Marketing group can do wonders for the bottom line.

Align for success and don't blame for failure. Failure is on both of you.

Product engineering

This is where technical debt can crush you. The choices you make for your product in the early days can come back to kill you. Look at Twitter in the early days, it was written using Ruby on Rails. That led to a lot of fail whales, which they eventually solved.?

Just because you're using some new-fangled language or system that works today for your product, it might not work tomorrow at scale. You should always have an "enterprise mind" when building your product. Ask yourself, will our product be robust enough at full enterprise scale?

If not, then consider using a more standard and approved language that's in production at Fortune 500 companies.?

Quality assurance & support

Quality assurance and support are the last piece of the product cycle and are equally as important. Deliver your product as promised, make sure you tested the hell out of it, and then support it.?

Consistently doing this builds trust with your customers and makes them believe you are the real deal. Too often startups skimp on this because they're running 100 miles a minute in every direction.?

Don't skimp on this. This is just as important as the latest feature or product you're building.?

Continue to collect data

I should've highlighted this better in my old blog post but I didn't. Now I'm going to highlight the "stuffing" out of it here. Collect data. Collect as much data about your sales, your marketing, your product, its usage, and what people are saying on your forums, on Twitter, and on LinkedIn.?

Collect, save, organize, curate, and analyze this data. Build sentiment models. Create product feature voting systems. Analyze your sales data and build better lead generation models.?

You must collect data for your startup at all phases and continue to do so.

Don't haphazardly collect the data and put some of it into an S3 bucket and other parts into a database. Have a cohesive data policy and stick to it.?

Be smart about collecting your data and analyzing it. It will pay massive dividends to your startup.?

Keep things simple

Above all, keep things simple as much as you can. Don't have three different project management tools. Don't build documentation for one product using one CMS and another for a different product.?

Think consistent UI and UX design. Make your startup look amazing and inviting. Walk your walk and talk your talk. Keep the lines of communication between you and your employees directly. Build a flat organization as best as you can and empower your employees. Let them do their job and don't micromanage.?

Be proactive and don't fall into the trap of worrying about it later, that's how technical and managerial debt builds up.?

Then go out and change the world.?

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