5 Biggest Mistakes Starting Up
1. Not crystallizing and/or communicating your 'Why'
This is probably the most diabolic misstep that companies tend to make in their early days. Unless you know exactly why you want your business/solution to exist in the world, you are mostly likely going to go through a ton of blood, sweat and tears - only to end up with a vaguely useful process/technology that won't see its way to even mild mass adoption. Your business idea has zero value unless this idea solves a problem that people have, or improves their quality of life. Time and effort must put into identifying exactly what your idea is meant to add to the market/world.
Once you believe with a significant degree of conviction that your idea will add value to a significant amount of people, the next step is to validate and communicate.
Validate: Ask the people around you if they will find this offering useful. Your team, your friends, your family heck, even people you don't like so much - this will ensure you get a wider spectrum of who your customers/users might be.
Communicate: Make sure that everyone working on this idea is crystal clear on this 'Why'. Right from your HR Manager to your QA folks, to your chai guy (ok maybe overkill), everyone needs to have a unified vision of what your team is aiming to build. Or you'll get the situation described in this cliched cartoon.
2. Not spending enough time figuring out the best 'Hows' and 'Whats'
Once the 'Why', and the goals are crystal clear to everyone on the team, a lot of organizations seem to latch on to one way of getting there. This could be say a particular way of solving the challenge they have chosen to work on - 'Let's build a CRM' / 'Let's get some influencers to endorse this' / 'Let's do newspaper insertions', or the latest wave of technology fads that are making the rounds (think crypto, AI, Tiktok integration(?!)).
Now, I'm in no way dissing these methods as invalid. In fact I think they're brilliant strategies, but only if:
You are very clear about what you want from them
Only when they keep you on a razor-focused path to your goals
Anything that doesn't fit the above two criteria, is either a nice-to-have, or a waste of time and other resources.
3. Not prototyping fast enough
SpaceX is known to make updates and changes to their spaceship specs almost once a week. This is the rate at which they experiment, analyse and tweak their machines. Which mind you, have to work at some extremely high levels of precision and reliability to have even a sliver of a chance of a successful mission.
It is absolutely imperative for any venture/idea in its early days to prototype, prototype, prototype. They don't have to be perfect and may see ridiculous in comparison to the final product/service that was envisioned, but we must do it anyway because:
The insights you get from seeing an actual prototype are 103071231723 times more advanced than any thought experiments you can devise.
The level of feedback you can get from potential customers is going to be supremely higher than if they only see/hear descriptions of what your offering is going to be.
Your team will be able to understand the vision and tactics of your product or service in so much more of a holistic view. Not only will they see the vision clearer, but also a snapshot of the intricacies that go into building the product or service from start to finish.
4. Spending too much time perfecting a product/service
It's very easy in the early days of getting an idea off the ground to get carried away in the excitement of building the ideal product. I've especially noticed this in tech heavy startups (but also plenty of non-tech), who try and build the ultimate solution before feeling comfortable enough into launch the product or service into the market.
This is not just a huge risk in terms of losing first mover advantage, but also quite counter-productive when you end up over-engineering a product or service without seeing live market feedback. One of the worse situations to be in for an idea, is to be diluted by the complexity of the solution that's supposed to execute it. Furthermore, a product/service is more likely to be adopted by customers/users when it is at its most basic form, no twiddly buttons/controls, no complicated processes, no bending over backwards to order a pizza (yes Dominos, your UX is revolting)
5. Not staying close enough to customers
It's also easy once your business is launched, to get carried away in weekly meetings and design sprints, without keeping an eye on what your customers are saying about initial versions of your product. Some questions you need to keep answering for yourself and your teams, that will help you course-correct super effectively:
Is the product/service reaching new customers organically through word of mouth? What is being said when customers are referring us?
What are the pain points my product or service is creating while solving others?
Why are the customers who are going to my competitors not choosing my product/service?
Why are customers not coming back after first use?
What are all the times that my customers are waiting in the whole cycle of business? Are these avoidable? How would customers like to be engaged in that time?
But hey, we fail to learn right? Kudos to everyone who's learned these things the painful way, because I know I have. Here's to hoping people read this and make other mistakes instead, and then write about it :)
Have questions or feedback? Want to discuss anything in particular? Reach out to me any time!
I head MotivOcean Consulting, and am helping startups and SMEs solve technology and business challenges with a combination of design thinking, and common sense.
