An early focus on achieving scale takes away from the initial priorities of discovery and validation – achieving product / market fit and then subsequently problem / solution fit. If a company scales without nailing operational efficiencies then they can lose control over customer acquisition costs and operational costs. The more customers you have, then the harder it can be to actually identify the need for and perform necessary pivots.
Why Startups should worry about Brand second
Startups primary focus is customer acquisition. This happens by refining the customer persona, defining and branding positioning statement and responding to the customer buying cycle. You lean this by engaging with customers. Working on brand comes second.
Is your annual business review relevant to helping move the business forward?
I love the disclaimer that “past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future gain” that is often affixed to advice or information from investment houses. Because it’s just that, a disclaimer. I get a chuckle out of it. The goal of most business owners is to do the opposite. To find a way to integrate lessons learned into their business models and build positive momentum towards future gains. And yes, if you find a way to do that consistently then everyone does come along – customers, investors, and the best talent – regardless of the disclaimer.
Don’t want Marketing and Sales silos in your Startup? Don’t create silos in the first place.
A lot has changed over time in terms of company business organization. Traditionally Marketing was about lead generation and collateral production. Basically inputs to the sales process. Sales was all closing deals and achieving quotas. Marketing had the long view, trying to please all Customers. Sales had the short view, trying to service a specific Customer today. Marketing had indirect exposure to Customers. Sales owned direct relationships. The turf wars in existing companies grew naturally about these very different mandates and responsibilities. A real life “best of times and worst of times” saga.
Why you might want to have a Pitch Deck ready even if you are not looking for funding
For the entrepreneur, life is often “just-in-time”. With this in mind, the typical Founder is likely to delay putting together a pitch deck until if or when they decide to go for external funding. I would like to present a contrarian view as to why creating a business pitch is actually one of the things they should be doing, even if they aren’t looking for funding today.
What if your Startup doesn’t fit into a maturity level box?
One thing I recommend founders to do is to think of the company as being a portfolio of projects, and the founder as being the strategic owner of this portfolio. Each specific product or service that the company is offering is a project in the portfolio that sits under the umbrella of the company. Then they can look at the maturity level of each project and the company itself. For example, a company that is offering a service to a customer base and at the same time is thinking of how they can translate that service into a SaaS product offering, may already have a good problem/market fit for the company itself, be in efficiency in terms of delivering the service and be just starting validation for the SaaS service.
