[LRUG] Startup Timeline

[Alan Buxton]

First off - people build all kinds of successful businesses in all kinds of
different ways. 

 

My bias is towards building a profitable business and bootstrapping as far
as you can go. Most successes I've seen or been a part of have had minimal
outside investment. One CEO I worked for even raised *all* his expansion
capital through selling stock to employees. You will need investment at some
point but just better to put it off until later as it always comes with
strings attached. Better to be looking for money when you aren't desparate
for it.

 

To be honest I don't think 3-5 years is very long. Lottery-win-style
businesses aside you would do well to hunker down for 5 or 10 years of hard
graft with various pivots along the way before you get your big exit. Though
I'm puzzled - why do you even worry about whether the media is going to
report it as an overnight success?

 

Probably obvious but worth saying: Make sure you really are the domain
expert in the area you are trying to work on. Which, for someone on this
list, probably means you are either working with a  co-founder who has the
inside track on a specific business problem or user behaviour, or that you
are building tools for developers.

 

I want to amplify Paul's point about being conservative about costs etc: You
absolutely need to realise that everything takes longer and costs more than
you think. Everything.

 

On which note - a very successful entrepreneur once told me his one single
golden rule about running businesses: "never run out of cash". Everything
else is noise. He was exaggerating of course but there's more than a nugget
of truth in there.

 

a

 

From: chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org [mailto:chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org] On
Behalf Of Paul Robinson
Sent: 03 March 2014 19:01
To: MG Lim
Cc: London Ruby Users Group
Subject: Re: [LRUG] Startup Timeline

 

On 3 March 2014 12:10, MG Lim <mirageglobe at gmail.com> wrote:

 

I am curious about how things for how ideas move on.... -> panning out to
projects -> gathering a team and finally to funding rounds?

 

 

Mistake number 1 I know I made: thinking that entrepreneurship is about
taking an idea and progressing it. This isn't just about software
entrepreneurship but covers everything from inventing a better mousetrap to
opening a pub.

 

Entrepreneurship is about identifying a market need and coming up with a
solution that fixes it better than the alternatives in the minds of the
customer.

 

It's a subtle difference, but the change in emphasis is really important. It
is not enough to have an idea and move it on: it needs you to spot a market
need and identify the solution, and then how you discuss that with
stakeholders (including the market) is what actually dictates the movement.

 

The more obvious the need the more excited people will be about a solution
(and the easier it will be to raise money, recruit, etc.). The more
convincing your solution, the quicker you will be able to go (because you'll
get more more money, more people, etc.).

As a result, detailed planning of almost anything pre-launch is likely
wishful thinking at best.

 

 

More of a general discussion; but what have your experiences been; if you
have been in that path or part of that path? "I wish I had done that in the
beginning" moments..

 

 

I wish I had been considerably more conservative and bearish with my
time/cost estimates on many occasions. On two occasions with hindsight I
allowed stakeholders with insufficient experience to take too much control
(so I got blamed for their fuck-ups), and on one occasion I did not let them
have enough (so they lost passion for what they were doing).

 

 

Marketing hells? Traction problems and in reality, the project took a good
3~5 years before media reported it as an overnight success.

 

 

Actually the reality is after 3-5 years you're probably on the wrong path
and in need of a pivot if you're not seeing growth. Most of the household
names had serious traction in under 18 months.

 

 

PS: particularly with ruby-based frameworks / meteor styled frameworks;
prototypes are quick to be churned out. 

 

 

There is no doubt that the power of modern frameworks reduces the time to
ship and therefore the cost.

 

What is harder to swallow for most technologists is that shipping the
product means virtually nothing on its own. 

 

In the same way a marketing team can only get so far with vapourware and the
fact they will eventually need to ship product, an engineering team can only
get so far without some serious marketing talent. Good companies with strong
traction get that way by getting both almost perfect and in harmony.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20140303/9a8e13fd/attachment-0003.html>