2 things every good startup needs

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.

Tags: execution, hiring, startup, strategy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Building Great Teams, Building Software, Startup & Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.