Robert Scoble has a great article today on his take on mistakes startups make.
You really should read his whole article but two things stand out for me.
- FOCUS ON USP: You should be able to say in one tweet why anyone should buy your product
- SMART AND GET THINGS DONE: You company is full of smart people but you know when to say “no” to them.
The first is strategic and the second is tactical.
Strategically, you need a razor-sharp focus on why you are different and you should be spending enough time thinking about why anybody will buy your product. Then, you should be able to express that differentiation in one sentence. (Robert gives the example of Prius: “It gets better mileage than your car”)
Tactically, we all know the importance of hiring smart team (Joel Spolsky even wrote a book about it). Its getting-things-done part that gets sidelined. One needs to be careful about over-engineering any part of the organization.
Over-engineering not just happens in engineering but can happen anywhere where very smart people exist. In my last company, we had a manager incentive plan so complex, that, famously, only two people in the entire organization understood it when it came out !! (those were the two people who designed it)
The reason plan was so complex was not because creators of the plan were evil or stupid but exactly the reverse. They wanted to be fair to everyone in every situation and they were some of the smartest people I have known in my life. However, the end goal was lost. An incentive plan is no good if you cannot even understand how you are being incentivized !!
At my current company – hCentive – we constantly worry about if there is anything at all on our web application that is extraneous. Something that will get in the way of a visitor’s experience of buying a health insurance plan – the tool time – needs to be removed.
Avinash – our UX designer – constantly comes up with yet another feature that we can add and I have to say no to many of his beautiful mockups. Not because they are bad ideas but because we want to leave it simple and truly make hCentive the easiest way to buy health insurance.
Scoble gives the example of Evan Williams (founder of Blogger and Twitter) here who prides himself on NOT doing things.
To summarize, if you know your goal (why customer will buy your product) and you have hired a smart team – the job of an entrepreneur is limited to just two things: saying no and moving the furniture out of the way.
As a startup founder myself, I tend to agree with you. The hard thing is to reward your team’s creativity and keep them motivated, whilst at the same time keeping them focused on revenue generating features.It’s even harder in the early days when you are involved in the technical development too (my current stage). Then you have to say “no” to yourself, which is, unfortunately, a lot harder than saying no to other people
Anne Curriehttp://www.workingprogram.com”Completely effortless time tracking for Windows” (is that a good enough USP??)
Anne,You said it very succinctly. Keeping the team productive while you say no to their well-intentioned ideas is one of the hardest part of the job.Thanks for pitching in.Tarun
Anne,On your USP, I would suggest some changes. If I can be honest with you, I think “completely effortless” is untrue. No activity in this universe is “completely effortless”.I would change it to something like: “Easiest way to track time on windows”. Of course, assuming it is THE easiest way to track time for everyone on windows. If its not the easiest way for everyone, then figure out the market segment (or activity) for which it is the easiest and add that to your USP.The point is: USP is not for others, its for us – the product managers. USP reminds us what features we DONT have to implement !!
Nice article . One problem/ side effect of saying No to good ideas is that it sometime put a question mark on the sense of employ ownership which founders oversell at the time of hiring . As someone who has worked in 4 startups i can say that Very few founders can relent the control when it comes to critical ,strategic decision . which is understandable as often time for founders , part motivation of starting up is to have freedom to do things *their* way .commit their own mistakes . No black and white solution to this problem i guess .
Prashant,That is a very good point. It is hard to let go of control of for a founder:* A founder probably have raised money (from family, friends or investors) and a fiduciary responsibility to spend it in the best way possible.* Your point of founders are almost “evolutionary selected” to run a company because they “love to do their own thing” is valid too.Personally, I think one has to choose the battles as a founder. You have to let go of certain things and exercise the most critical things very carefully. My personal experience: In the three companies I founded, we have always tried to delegate as much as we can. I think I have never regretted not delegating enough; but have regretted delegating control a few times