Platitudes And Longitude

6 Common Platitudes Every Startup Hears—and Whether or Not You Should Listen.

It’s easy to be fickle when you’re an inexperienced co-founder and you’re risking everything on your first tech startup. Sure, you have confidence in what you’re setting out to do, but you’re not quite sure exactly how to get there—so you search for knowledge, guidance, and advice—as you should. Any intelligent person will search for data and prior experience that will give them an edge and cut the learning curve.

But what about when pieces of advice contradict each other? What if they are both from very credible sources? What if it all just becomes too damn much.

Welcome to the world of startups.

Since me and my co-founders began working on our company, we’ve become inundated by massive amounts of advice from pretty much everyone we’ve met.

“You gotta’ change the name, the name is VERY important, it shouldn’t exceed five syllables, the name’s too long.” -Finance guy at the bar

I’m assuming he wants us to keep with mobile app tradition and create a cute, cheeky, more friendly name. Perhaps we should sever the name’s extra limb and cauterize the wound with a suffix such as -ly or -ify. Sure, your name is an important part of your brand, but if you have a good reason behind it, and you believe in it — stick with it. Besides, once something that was once weird or different becomes successful, it doesn’t seem so weird or different anymore.

What’s new and different always seems strange at first, until it doesn’t.

The key is to know why you make a decision, and if you feel it’s the right one, stick with it. Besides, things may change as your business grows — and you’ll make mistakes, many mistakes—but as long as you make many small, recoverable mistakes and avoid the big, company crushing ones, you’ll be fine…maybe. Just remember that everyone will have opinions on what you should do, and they can’t all be right.

So without further ado, here’s a list of the top 6 most used platitudes of advice I’ve come across during the forming of my company.

6. Don’t let someone steal your idea

Great ideas are hard to come by, and you don’t want someone stealing your million dollar idea, right? Wrong. Great ideas are not hard to come by, they are everywhere, and chances are someone has had your same idea before, and someone else is probably thinking it right now. There’s a bit of naivete when it comes to this platitude. The arrogance, and ignorance, inherent in the belief that an idea is what makes a company successful is just categorically incorrect. Ideas are a dime a dozen—the execution is everything.

I’ll say that again: execution is everything.

If you’re hiding your idea or making every person and investor you talk to sign an NDA, then you’re squashing your chances of attracting potential investors, talent, crucial feedback, etc.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t look into securing patents and intellectual property — proprietary tech is important — but don’t let it get in the way of your success. The chances of you pitching an investor or telling someone about your early-stage startup and then having them turn around and steal your business idea, recreate from scratch what you’ve already built, hire a team, find the market, then compete directly with you — who already has a head start—just doesn’t happen as often as people think. Besides, if someone wants to infringe on your patents, unless you’re flush with cash, good luck fighting it in court. It’s better to keep your head down, make sure you have the right team, and execute properly.

5. You need to solve a problem

This is an obvious statement, right? All great businesses solve a problem. But it’s not always as simple as that. As explained in this article “Painkillers vs. Vitamins” , based upon research done by Nir Eyal in his book Hooked, you don’t always need to solve a particular pain-point, sometimes all that’s necessary is that you fill a want—even if people don’t even know they want it yet.

A popular criticism of Silicon Valley and the vast amount of tech startups popping up, is that people are trying to create solutions to problems that people don’t have. They quickly find this out when the app falls flat and fails to acquire users. But this isn’t always true. You don’t need to go searching for big problems to solve, often times it is small improvements, added features, or even the creation of new solutions to problems believed to already have been solved. People are historically bad at realizing what they need or want, it’s up to entrepreneurs to figure that out. There is always (eh, I hate extremes) there is usually a better way, a better product, or a new solution that people won’t realize is the future until it has already arrived. Don’t get stuck on solving everyone’s big problems.

If you think you’ve made a meaningful improvement, tapped into a want or need that hasn’t been validated yet, or are onto something you find helpful — go ahead and pursue it.

4. Launch early and often

There’s plenty of truth to this piece of advice. If you’re starting something new and you’re not sure what your market is yet, or how people might use your product, or if there is even a market at all — then by all means launch and test. But make sure you’re careful and taking a smart approach to your initial launch and test phases. There is a reason that Facebook got rid of it’s old motto “move fast and break things” and replaced it with something a little less reckless and more stable: “move fast with stable infra.” Setting a solid foundation allows you to be more flexible when moving fast, don’t comprise the infrastructure of your business.

3. Never perform heart surgery in public

This is perhaps one of the most natural inclinations startups have when considering launching their product—they want to make sure it’s perfect before they let it out to the public. There’s some truth to this, meaning that you want to do as much due dilligence as you can before launching the product, and answering the basic (X) questions before considering if it is an idea worth purusing. However, you are always going to be performing heart surgery in public. Fortunately, with a well-defined process and agile methodologies, you can perform this heart surgery while being controlled about the risks and smart about the value of the data you collect from the public. There is always going to be bugs, things will go wrong, you will remove features, add features, potentially change core aspects of your business—and this is just part of the risk of starting a business. You can’t waste all of your time trying to make your product perfect, at some point you have to let it loose. So if you’re going to perform heart surgery in public, make sure you’ve prepared as much as possible, but don’t let the patient die before you actually start the surgery.

2. Make something disruptive

Disruption has become one of the top three mega-buzzwords in the tech community (right next to revolutionize, pivot, synergy). Disruption can be good, it is good — but don’t set out to create a business just because it is disruptive to an industry. The most innovative and, yes, revolutionary businesses will often times be disruptive, but don’t disrupt just for it’s own sake. Often times if you are too disruptive to an industry at the start, you may have trouble with the adoption and rollout of your product. I’ve seen businesses who have a truly disruptive and revolutionizing solution at the core of their model, but in the process of trying to be too radically different, they end up disrupting aspects of the current model that functioned really well and had been in place for good reason and as a result of years of testing. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, take advantage of the research and knowledge of those before you. Find what can be improved upon, and disrupt those things. It takes wisdom to figure out what needs disrupting and what doesn’t.

1. Investors are all about a good story

I have a love-hate relationship with this platitude. It definitely holds true, but not 100%. Investors aren’t all about a good story, but if you can’t tell a good story for you product, you probably won’t succeed. If you can’t tell this story it means that you haven’t thought about it enough or you don’t have a good one to tell. Like it or not, narratives and stories are the currency in which our brains trade. I learned this back in film school as a screenwriter, and it holds true in everyday life. Telling a compelling story gives coherence to your business — it makes people understand, makes them feel, and gives them an emotional connection in some way. Often times a good story can shroud other weaknesses of your business model. We’ve all seen companies get funded and thought “how the &%$* did that happen?!” It’s probably because they told a good story.

The caveat is that savvy investors hear a lot of stories, and often times a lot of good stories — compelling stories. Even if you impress them with your grand vision and narrative prowess, at the end of the day, you need something to back it up. You need reasons of why people will use your product, why your service is better, why you have an unfair advantage — and be able to demonstrate the concrete steps you’ll take to capturing a sizable portion of the market.

Tell your story and be able to back it up.

There you have it, some of the most common tech platitudes I’ve come across in the past two years.

Feel free to comment with advice that you’ve gotten during you entrepreneurial journey.