Startups  –  Don’t Change Directions Just Because You Can

As a startup founder, you get to hear the following things:

1. Take quick decisions and move fast
2. Pivot, be agile, and iterate
3. Fail fast

The aforementioned points, in some sense, tells you to change direction. While I strongly believe in these points, and re-emphasize on them, I also need to advise you ‘not to keep changing directions’.

Don’t get me wrong. It is alright to take small steps when you are unsure. Short steps are controlled, but you also need to review the change of direction from time to time. I have done this for a long time. Taking small steps means that you are sure about the direction for the next few miles. You won’t change the direction in that small trip until you review it.

What do I mean by ‘changing directions’?   It means to plan something, then start doing it, then stop doing it midway, and start doing something else. When you read this, you will be like  –  ‘Why would someone ever do that?’ Let me give an example.

You start working on one product. Either, while working on it or after completing it, you suddenly have another bright idea. Or you feel this one wouldn’t work. You start working on the new ‘shiny stuff’. Think about this  –  the plan was to ideate -> build -> Market -> Sell -> Make money ->Scale up.

No product will market and sell on its own. Once the product is built, it takes quite a bit of effort to get it moving in the market. So, when you go to the new product at the 3rd or 4th stage, you are essentially changing directions too quickly (even without giving a shot). It is true in other cases where you drop a marketing plan or a fund raise in between.

Often, I hear this  – ‘There is no waste, at all’ or ‘We are re-using everything for the new product’. Think about it. You spend time/effort/money on ideation, validation, project management, development, deployment, feedback, market, sell, and more. Even if you simply did 3–5 of these steps, you would still have a lot of wasted effort. There is NO way you will be able to ‘re-use’ everything.

Startups (particularly ones started by tech founders) don’t see any waste. They only consider the money that went in (which might be near zero). But the value of effort, time, mind space, focus that you or your team gave to the product to take to this level is worth a lot. Imagine that if you had outsourced all those activities to another company or a team of developers, how much they would have charged? That is probably a percentage of what got wasted. If you don’t understand this quickly enough, you will burn out pretty soon (because unlike the founders, the tech team starts feeling awkward to keep working on different things without any of their work actually materialising).

So what to do?

Think back and try to find out whether you are making a mistake. The only way to out of this is to understand and realize this. We had this problem during our early days.

In your hindsight, are you making too many jumps?

Yes, you are a startup. But think through as much as possible. Try to imagine how would things be 3 weeks, 6 weeks, or 24 weeks  from now. Fast forward and see whether this makes sense.

Spend more time in validation

Before you take the decision, review it multiple times, with multiple people (the right ones). Usually, it is customers > founders <> Advisor.

Start taking decisions based on data (and your gut feeling)

For instance, when you start a marketing campaign, track the current number of visitors, conversions, sources, bounce rates, etc. Then do the campaign. Complete the campaign to validate or invalidate the marketing method. From that time, you should be able to tell whether to continue or not.

If you spend 18–24 months with a valid problem statement in a good landscape, you will end up learning so much that you would increase your probability of success.

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