Why isn’t your startup working?

Last night I was watching “The Nineties” on CNN. It was the music episode. As many of you know, other than investing in startups, I spend my time with family and music. Don’t have a lot of hobbies, but I love going to concerts. I’m a big fan of Metallica, Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Soundgarden…you get the picture. I went to Lollapalooza its first year. Cliche Gen X.?

While I’m not a huge Eminem fan, they did cover him in the show and renewed my curiosity.?

From his song “I’m not afraid”

I'm not afraid (I'm not afraid)

To take a stand (to take a stand)

Everybody (everybody)

Come take my hand come (come take my hand)

We'll walk this road together, through the storm

Whatever weather, cold or warm

Just lettin' you know that you're not alone

Holla if you feel like you've been down the same road

Seemed like a good snippet for this crowd.?

If you are a founder and fundraising is on your mind, I could see why you have the Sunday Scaries. I could also see that if your fundraising options are concerning, that you may be re-evaluating your team. Here are some things to consider when re-evaluating your team.?

1. Did you hire this person to be able to do the work at hand based on their current experience and they would grow their capabilities as the company grew?
2. Were they overqualified for the role, but based on growth that the company would grow into needing their experience??
3. Were your investors sold on this person as part of the management team?
4. Was this person brought on to be a utility player to figure out the functional area?
5. Are you freeing up a payroll budget to survive or to hire someone at a lower cost to do a more focused job?
6. Is this person tired??
7. What is your management overhead with this person?
8. Have they been results oriented and understand when they are hitting their results or do they have to be told?

Obviously these are just a sampling of questions to consider. At a high-level if you are looking to continue your startup but need to focus on “default alive”, you may be inclined to downsize to your original team. That is generally a mistake. In reality, you have hopefully learned some things along the way and understand the work to be done. You ran experiments with your initial team, but now you know what works and what doesn’t. Another thing to consider is that some of the things that have become highly operationalized could now be done by AI or an offshore team. This could also be the decision point to shut your startup down. Buying more runway with no lift means that you are never going to take off, so why buy more runway. So what’s wrong? Let’s start with your ICP. Do you know it? Has it changed? Were you expanding your ICP and now contracting?

If you are not in this position, good for you. The above could be a good reason to understand your ICP.?

In our incubator this week, I was explaining why ICP is so important. Generally ICP is very focused on for customer discovery and eventually GTM. The reality is that ICP touches every functional area of your startup.?

Marketing?

Who am I targeting?

How am I targeting them?

What message am I targeting them with?

What’s an MQL for them?

What’s an SQL for them?

Sales

What are my sales tactics?

What are my average deal sizes?

What are my sales cycles?

Product Development

What basic features are needed?

What technical requirements are needed?

What frequency of feature releases are expected?

Customer Success

What is my onboarding process?

What are my hours of operation?

How do I engage with the customer??

Onsite, virtually, self service portal?

Finance

How much capital do I need to fund GTM?

How much capital do I need to cover

This isn’t everything but hopefully you can apply to your own company and get a sense.?

Here are two very different examples to make the point clearer.?

Let’s look at Google Apps. It is all digital marketing, self service and you pay when you sign up. There is no phone number to even call anyone. It’s an inexpensive service that if a sales person did an in-person sales call, they would lose money on that alone. The ICP, small to medium sized businesses with limited in-house IT capabilities. The user community is digitally savvy and doesn't need to be trained.?

Let’s look at buying SAP software. They will highly pre-qualify you as a prospect. A team of 5 will show up. There will be a dedicated support and consulting team. The sales cycle will be long because it’s a big decision and involves understanding the company workflows, migrating data, training etc. Their ICP is a Fortune 1000 company with an extensive IT department, custom needs and a multi-year roll out.?

These are intentionally very different ICP. So as you develop your ICP, I highly suggest that you carry it across every functional area.?