Today I stumbled upon a Jason Calacanis’ post to his email mailing list called “(The) Startup Depression” (I’ve put a link to a Google search because the original post was removed from TechCrunch). Some thoughts I liked the most:
There are three reasons why businesses can fail:
- it’s a bad idea
- bad execution
- outside factors
Examine your business with these three filters to see where you’re at.
Outside factors are the things you cannot control, but Execution and Ideas are the things that you should review and re-estimate very often if you want your startup to succeed. Here’s how Calacanis ofers to do this:
The Execution
How well you’re executing?
- Are you ahead, behind or on schedule?
- How everyone in your organization rank your product?
- How outsiders rank your product and features?
Put your project up against your two top competitors, compare yourself and your competitors on the top 10 features.
Execution is the easiest thing to fix, and you can do it one of two ways:
- get the people in your organization to perform at a higher level,
- or get higher-level folks into your organization.
It really is that simple: folks can either step up or step out.
The Idea
If you’re idea is wrong, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is if the original idea allows you to evolve into your big idea.
- Have you adapted to your market?
- Have your customers asked you for something different than you’re currently providing?
- Have you given it to them?
- After you give them what they want, can you anticipate what they’ll ask for next?
- Are those items following a theme?
Your first idea is rarely your best.
Indeed many of todays widely-known successful projects have started with totally different idea and than evolved.
