What is paramount for an early stage startup?
Entrepreneurship is hard, everyone will tell you that, but in practice, it is even harder. Being enrolled in Founder Institute acceleration program for 3 months I have felt it on myself. Though, being in an accelerator thought me a lot more.
What I want to underline in this blog post is the importance of the team and the speed in a startup.

The Team
A small intro, I entered this program with 2 co-founders, Eugeniu Girla and Iulian Gulea. Our idea was to build a recommendation engine for fiction books, based on content (btw, it is called BookVoyager). In 3 months we were thinking about pivoting uncountable times, but the only major improvement over the initial idea was our switch from B2B to B2C.
So you see, we started as a team, and I can guarantee, that only this way we made it to the end. Only by supporting, giving valuable feedback and distributing workload between us we were able to pass through all the challenges. Doing all this alone would have resulted in a sure failure.
A good team is made of people with common vision and different skills. Because in the beginning, you gonna have to do everything, from marketing and customer interviews to writing content and programming.
According to CBInsights the third main reason startups fail is because of a bad team.
Select carefully the ones with whom you want to build the next unicorn.
The Speed
If you think that by speed I mean to overrun the competitors, you’re terribly wrong. As far as you have something unique and useful about your product or service, and it’s hard to copy, you should be OK with the competitors.
You need speed to deliver the product to the market as soon as possible, and then iterate over it, constantly testing assumptions about what market needs and how well your solution fit the requirements. That’s why you need speed.
You need speed when there’s a critical issue in your solution and you should fix it ASAP. You need it because you don’t have much money, so you need to be profitable to sustain the business.
How do you achieve high speeds? See the section above 😉
Last words
“Done is better than perfect” — Sheryl Sandberg
… that’s why I publish this article even if I don’t really like it.
I should definitely kill the perfectionist inside myself.
