I strongly believe in the power of the right people in the right place. For a startup, this makes the difference between life and death. While there aren’t two startups alike, the things I will talk about in this article apply to all of them.
I was fortunate enough to learn a lot of things the hard way and I want to share them with both early entrepreneurs and people who are wasting their potential instead of joining a startup.
Everyone has that one great idea at one point in life. Envisioning a product for the future is one of the best things you can do with your daydreaming time, but the real challenge is getting it done. For a product that hopes to change the world, you might have to consider creating your own startup.
We hear about startups in the news all the time. In fact, they are mentioned so often these days that it seems everyone’s doing it. But in reality only a handful of entrepreneurs go through the motions like they’re supposed to. For instance, did you know that writing down every detail as it hits your head can turn out to be crucial for the success of the product? How about re-launching more than once? These practices, as well as many others, are vital to building a successful institution that can generate retention and revenue.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
It’s a good idea to look at other people’s mistakes every once in a while. As humorist Sam Levenson once said, “You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.” In business, it’s vital that you avoid practices that have “high-risk” written all over them. But that’s not the only way you can fail as a startup.
Photo by Alex Perez on Unsplash
If you could pick any place on Earth to kick-start a venture, what would it be? Startups are almost synonymous with Silicon Valley, but that’s the media’s fault. In reality, startup companies aren’t typical to America at all. In fact, some of the most innovative ideas today are being brewed in Europe and Asia.
To give everyone justice, a community called Founded X offers this cool website where you pick a country and get instant stats about things that matter to a startup – ease of funding, expertise markets, internet coverage/speed, office rental, corporate income tax, etc. You also get some conventional info regarding the weather, the national dish, the average price of a beer (always a good lifestyle indicator), currency, and population density.
Apparently a lot of software engineers fail to understand the importance of product management and most product managers are well aware about this. Unfortunately, most of the time, they blame the engineers’ education for the lack of vision, while in fact there is a much simpler explanation – engineers have witnessed product management failures once too many times. Truth be told, relatively few businesses value product management, even if they hire one product manager for every three engineers.
Recently, a friend asked me to talk to his son who will soon be a fresh IT graduate. His son received tempting job offers from three companies and he was kind of puzzled as to what company to choose at the start of his career.
After discussing with the young man for about ten minutes, I was a little puzzled myself, because he was not actually looking for advice, but for valid reasons not to join any of those companies.
When I first ask someone this question, I usually get a brutal answer: not a chance!!! This is what I’ve learned the hard way: true innovation is a process. Accidental innovation is not a process, but a fortunate mistake. 😉 In order to innovate, you have to follow a recipe because innovation must be consistent.
Organizing a software company can look like rocket science nowadays. But it shouldn’t be!
Apparently, most startups are unorganized. In other words, when someone who previously worked for a large entity joins the team, they are surprised at the lack of organization. Later on, they are even more surprised to learn that many things actually work better that way.