Startups and multiple choice questions
When I was a kiddo, the type of knowledge and skills assessment I hated the most were MCQs. For subjects that I had most difficulties in, MCQs brought doubt when I had little confidence.
As startup founders, we face hundreds of MCQs every week.
It's only been about 6 months that we first started working on SubMate. In those 6 months, we've faced hundreds (thousands?) of decisions. Signup button : blue or green? Company type: SARL or SAS? Pizza: Luccio or Paulo? Team: interns or employees? Nothing new here.
We usually handle those choices the following way (and pretty much in that order):
- does it need to be discussed?
- are we internally knowledgeable enough to make the decision?
- who do we need help from?
What about our next release?
When it comes to design/product questions, this process is becoming harder. It involves or impacts your team, your startup lifespan, your strategy, your funding, your goal as a founder, your revenue goals, you marketing/viral efforts, and your users of course (and first!).
When it comes to design/product questions, this process is becoming harder. It involves or impacts your team, your startup lifespan, your strategy, your funding, your goal as a founder, your revenue goals, you marketing/viral efforts, and your users of course (and first!).
What Vinicius says is that for the lifespan of Yipit (a new-york based startup doing deals aggregation), which now amounts to 3 years, they've been going through 5 different and separate models.
But the issue (the "temptation" as Vinicius puts it) also runs down for each of the unique models. When running a startup, those choices can take the form of alluring features buzzing for a day, a week or a month on all tech blogs. They can appear in moments of doubts (what Tim Ferriss calls the "informed pessimism").
"Damn, those cool startups lately all revolve around feature B. We do feature A, what about spinning into A' ?".
Why would we? Because it's sexy for investors. It's sexy for the dev team. It's sexy to be part of the buzz.
"Damn, those cool startups lately all revolve around feature B. We do feature A, what about spinning into A' ?".
Why would we? Because it's sexy for investors. It's sexy for the dev team. It's sexy to be part of the buzz.
Focus
These QCMs are not the same as in high school: there's no wrong answer. That's the added difficulty of those choices. They all lead you to a different path, a different direction. Josh points out (and rightly so), that a pre-launch business plan is always wrong. And we know that - your startup DNA will evolve on a day-to-day basis for the next years.
So the real challenge is here: always choosing the right evolution (evolution is "mandatory") while staying on the right track (your vision).
For those choices, the thought process might go like this:
- is it really a killer feature/addon? (e.g. OpenID and Oauth)
- will it "stick" or is it a fad? (e.g. Facebook apps in 2008)
- do people really want this?? (e.g. Google Buzz)
- do our users want this? (e.g. LinkedIn in Seesmic)
- how well does it integrate to our product?
- how much does it stretch our product?
- how far does it push back the next release?
At SubMate, we have a big fat dashboard of where we wanna go - our mojo, our prayers. And I have a cool cofounder which preferred answer to any suggestion is "why??" before "cool!!".
So guys, how do you handle the sirens of the additional features?
To end up, a great TED talk by Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex
Comments 4 Comments
With regards to decisions, I bucket them into "is it permanent or can we quickly reverse it?"
If we can quickly reverse it, we just make a decision as quickly as possible and monitor it to see if we were wrong.
If it has more permanent consequences (raising money, from whom, hiring a full-time person), then we take our time to make sure we make the best decision we can.