Startup Biology
Let’s talk about entrepreneurship in terms of “biology”. The article contains adult content, a little bit. Let me warn you before I start.
Ideas, ideas, ideas… Ideas are sperms we generate. There are too many of them but quantity doesn’t matter. If you want to make a baby, you have to have sex; otherwise it is called “idea masturbation”.
Let’s continue with ovum. (Probably you understood the analogy right now!) Guess what it represents: Customer. There are too many sperms that could not reach the ovum because of weak tails (Team Skills), chemicals (Team Passion), etc. Even if they can reach it, customer likes and buys only one of them. Ups! I’ve met many entrepreneur-candidates, they find an idea and work hard on it without talking with customers. It is same as to want to have a baby without a partner & have sex. (Of course I am talking about natural fertilization, God bless medicine!) Just like making a baby is not easy job for a lot of couples, fertilization of an idea needs a lot of tries, effort, timing, etc.
After fertilization we have a zygote, the first form of problem-solution fit. Let’s continue building on it. Embryonic development phase is too important, embryo needs nutrition coming from the mother (Market!). In a few weeks the embryo has some visible body parts, heart and head. Yay! You got your Minimum Viable Product! Of course it does not look like what you want to create. However you have an heartbeat, exciting moment for parents undoubtedly.
In our startup, we have experienced the 9. month effect. Customers started to purchase more although we did’t do anything extra. While we are experiencing such a situation, I read an article of another entrepreneur about their 9. month effect same as ours. (I could not find the article’s link.) Is this the birth in this metaphor? No idea, I didn’t think about that until this paragraph.
I could not force my little biology knowledge on the metaphor any more, maybe you can add some analogous points to develop it.
Have sex, world needs more babies!
