While traditional technology companies operate under a waterfall methodology, start-ups today use an agile method. In the past, a group of engineers would work for months, if not years, to build a product before eventually bringing it to market. This software development lifecycle was akin to trying to become the perfect candidate before applying to a job. With agile taking over in the past decade, the new model preaches quick turnarounds — maximize value, reduce risk, and do just enough to get yourself to the next stage.
This mindset has been coined as “permanent beta.” Your life can be viewed in the same way.
While the start-up mentality has been suggested as a way to navigate your career, we can also adopt this mindset in our personal lives. Here are 4 start-up commandments to begin with.
1. Build a Minimal Viable Product, not the “perfect” product.
Perfectionism is your greatest enemy. So often, people want to write the perfect essay or create the perfect dinner dish before ever sharing with others. Case in point, I used to own a blog with a group of awesome contributing writers — originally, we privately shared writings on googledocs and everyone was very open, receptive, and quick to post. However, once we moved our writing onto a public blog with an audience, writers were much more reluctant to post and often held their pieces in draft mode for weeks, tweaking and perfecting them. The perfectionism mentality does not improve us at all.
Instead of creating the perfect moment or product, create just enough — this is a minimal viable product (MVP).
The point of adopting a MVP is so you can apply iterative tweaks to it, over and over again. In life, do just enough to satisfy a goal and each day, or each week, improve it a little bit more. I’m trying to eat out less and cook more, so I’ve started at the bare minimum by ordering groceries online and cooking the same meals a few times per week. Yes, it’s a lazy approach, but it’s sure as hell less scary than having to buy groceries at Safeway and walk the 15 uphill blocks back to my apartment. Next, I think I will try a meal delivery subscription and learn a new recipe per week. I’m still a long way from throwing a dinner party, but it’s a start.
2. Learn and pivot.
A pivot can be defined as “structured course correction designed to test a new hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.” In start-ups, this happens when your customer feedback is significant enough to make you realize that your company / product / strategy is heading down the wrong path. When this happens, it’s difficult for founders to have a conversation to potentially “abandon” their vision and come up with something new. The lack of doing so though, has caused hundreds of companies their place in the market (hello Borders, Blockbusters, and 90% of startups).
The same can be said of what we do in life — the ability to reflect, recognize, and re-invent is incredibly important. Too often, we’re stuck on what we should do and who we should be that we fail to see better opportunities and abandon ship to swim towards those. It’s taboo to quit. But actually, if you quit often and quit fast, you might be reducing the amount of time you are putting into something that is not eventually worthwhile. If you recognize that the career path you are on is not for you, staying on it for another week or month is simply a waste of time. If you’ve decided that your 2014 new years resolution was to run a half-marathon, but realized after 1 month of training that you are much more suited for yoga and want to become a yoga instructor, then don’t be scared to quit.
This mentality has worked for a number of start-ups you might be familiar with. This, however, does not mean that it’s right to abandon everything — have the grit to work towards what you really want. The fundamental philosophy is that once you discover your current path is not the right option for you, it’s time to try something new.
3. Have a laser sharp focus. Avoid feature creep.
There’s a famous story out there about Steve Jobs and the four quadrants. When Jobs came back to Apple in the 1990s, there were far too many product lines and different business units in the company. Jobs recognized that companies that have simple business models can replicate their success repeatedly, and enforced a company-wide reorg so that there were only 4 main products (1 for every quadrant) and every employee could only align with one of those quadrants.
The same can be applied to our own lives. Instead of being an expert at anything, we often try to do too much and become mediocre at everything. I’ve done this far too often by trying to pick up too many hobbies at once. Last year, I was signed up for online classes on a variety of platforms including Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, Skillshare, and NovoEd — it’s no wonder that I never ended up finishing any of them. Our own quadrants might look something like this — Personal vs. Professional on the X-axis, and Quantitative Goal vs. Qualitative Goal on the Y-axis. As of now, my quadrant is 1. Walk 10,000 steps per day & cut sugar; 2. Learn SQL; 3. Write more, breed creativity; and 4. Find opportunities that excite me. Not a bad idea to get four post-its and put these on my wall.
4. Build a user base, strategically.
Pinterest, Quora, and Instagram are well-known consumer platforms that have millions of users today. At the beginning though, all 3 only released beta versions of their product to a select group of people. Pinterest operated in ‘invite-only’ mode for over a year in order to allow users to define communities (that’s why you see so many posts for weddings, food, travel destinations, DIY). Quora founders reached out to their tech networks to gain high-profile users. Instagram founders only gave 100 of their closest photographer and start-up friends access to the app in order to gain valuable feedback.
Why is this relevant? Instead of listening to everyone, it’s important to get feedback from dedicated users that can help you grow towards the direction you want to grow in — the same can be said of friends and networks. Who you choose to influence you is just as important as how they influence you. What you project is what you attract, and the cycle will continue.
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