Startup Lessons I Learned Firsthand
Last October, I discontinued work on a startup I had been pursuing with a co-founder for over a year. We had gone from ideation to user testing to launch of a mobile app concept and encountered what most startups fear: lukewarm adoption. While the decision to end our joint efforts was somewhat difficult, it also seemed obvious: we had run out of pivots that made sense to pursue.
As I look back on the journey, there are several pieces of learning that I hope will benefit you in your own entrepreneurial pursuits:
1. You only have so many bullets in your magazine. As I was evaluating whether to persist or move on, this piece of advice from a close founder friend stayed with me. If you want to be an entrepreneur, life is a series of shots you take. It’s a series of experiments that you run. When you come to the realization that your current shot isn’t going to make it into the goal, you should start preparing for your next attempt. Ego shouldn’t complicate the decision; you know when you know.
2. Build a painkiller. Vitamins are great for you, but you’re not going back home if you forget to take them. When you’re in pain, all life stops without a painkiller. You simply can’t go on; you really need it.
We learned through a series of qualitative interviews and quantitative analytics that what we had built was really a vitamin. No one would tell us that directly; we just had to infer it from what we were hearing. Bigger priorities were finding a mate, getting a job, and general recreation. Neither of us could see how our product would really move further up the priority stack. Even if everyone agreed that our app was a nice-to-have, it didn’t stand a chance in the competition for someone’s time when life really kicked in.
3. Use the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework to understand your own product. If you don’t know what JTBD is, check this out. Once you can truly understand the purpose that your product or service solves in a customer’s life, it will drive home how you should think and talk about your product. It will become clear to you whether this product is a painkiller or a vitamin. It could dramatically alter your product roadmap.
4. Build technology only once you’ve intimately understood the problem you’re trying to solve. Be sure you’re not working the other way around. While it may seem obvious, we all love products that seem cool at the outset. But when there is no real problem attached to the cool solution, then you’re in trouble. The startup product graveyard is full of products like these. No one goes out of their way to adopt a new product, especially in today’s world, unless it’s actually solving something for them.
In my last startup, we pre-emptively began with a product concept (i.e. a solution) that we adjusted over time to fit different use cases (i.e. problems). While I’m sure this could work in theory, let me assure you, it’s much harder. Instead, any solution that comes into the founders’ minds while researching a problem area should be loosely held and clarified over time through iterative feedback and actual user data. What you end up building could be entirely different and better if you wait.
5. Make sure every pivot is intentional. In the world of moving fast (as startups do), it is often unclear why certain decisions were made at the time that forced the product in a new direction. Someone said something at a meeting; a user who was interviewed mentioned an idea that seemed like a better target than the original; one day a founder woke up and just changed things. I spent a great deal of time reflecting on the idea maze we went through and the various pivots. Looking back, I recognize now that each pivot we made should have been far more intentional. Was a particular conversation we had really a reason to alter our direction? Had we spoken to enough users? Drawing these pivot decisions out and explicitly stating them could prevent some subconscious moves that end up being detrimental.
6. Three things make a startup fundable: background, traction, or both. While you can always begin a startup journey in any industry you want, there seems to be good reason why VCs look for founders who have a background in the industry they are founding in. They are already a step ahead in knowing the edge of the current industry, and they know at least some of the pitfalls to avoid. My co-founder and I were building in an industry we knew little about, and although we found it engaging to explore something new, we found that other startups in our space had a much deeper bench of talent that came from the industry. They knew how to solve some initial go-to-market issues that took us months of work.
7. Once you’ve nailed down your concept (even at a high level), lay out your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. GTM is one of the least talked about but most important parts of a successful startup journey. If your product succeeds in initial adoption, how do you plan to get it a wider audience? Geoffrey Moore’s book on Crossing the Chasm is a good starting point for B2B companies on this front.
