“Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work” Thomas Edison
“Be nimble”. “Focus or Falter”. “Opportunity knocks”. “Distractions kill”.
Mixed messages? You bet.
But if you’re going to run a successful, profitable, market-driven company you’d better get used to dealing with such dilemmas. After all, your customers want you to pay them homage by plugging in every feature they think of as they use your product. Prospects want everything (and more) that your competitor is telling them they have. Market analysts are telling you you’re going to miss the “next great thing” if you don’t give your strategy a total make over. Your investors want profits. Your employees want bonuses. You just want that gnawing in your stomach to cease.
What to do?
It’s imperative in a start up, and for that matter at any stage, to have clear and communicated objectives. Along any road you’re going to find new discoveries, opinions, criticisms, afterthoughts, doubts, moments of clarity and epiphanies. Any one of them could lead you riches or to doom. But, if you’ve identified your market opportunity, done your research and plotted your course based upon research and consensus rather than hope and guts you’ll better be able to determine which things that lie along the road to success are opportunities and which are land mines.
In other words, when you come to that fork in the road…you’ll take it.
“Be nimble”. “Focus or Falter”. “Opportunity knocks”. “Distractions kill”.
Mixed messages? You bet.
But if you’re going to run a successful, profitable, market-driven company you’d better get used to dealing with such dilemmas. After all, your customers want you to pay them homage by plugging in every feature they think of as they use your product. Prospects want everything (and more) that your competitor is telling them they have. Market analysts are telling you you’re going to miss the “next great thing” if you don’t give your strategy a total make over. Your investors want profits. Your employees want bonuses. You just want that gnawing in your stomach to cease.
What to do?
It’s imperative in a start up, and for that matter at any stage, to have clear and communicated objectives. Along any road you’re going to find new discoveries, opinions, criticisms, afterthoughts, doubts, moments of clarity and epiphanies. Any one of them could lead you riches or to doom. But, if you’ve identified your market opportunity, done your research and plotted your course based upon research and consensus rather than hope and guts you’ll better be able to determine which things that lie along the road to success are opportunities and which are land mines.
In other words, when you come to that fork in the road…you’ll take it.
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1 comment:
Marc Andreeson talked about something he called Rachleff's Corollary of Startup Success:
The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
In that light, the only difference between an opportunity and a distraction is whether, in hindsight, it got you closer to the market fit. It's kinda like trying to beat an index fund. Looking back on the field of a thousand competitors, you can always point at a "winner", but, really, they just got lucky that their distractions turned out to be opportunities. There's a base level of competence that's absolutely required, but Lady Luck plays more of a role than we're willing to admit sometimes.
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