Value and Waste.

How Startups Can Be Value-Driven From Day 1.

For most startups, raising cash is the hardest nut to crack. If a founder is smart, has a great idea and a strong network, they’re more likely to raise VC cash early on.

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Once there’s cash, brain juices drown every employee; the designers talk about design systems and accessibility, the engineers go serverless and JAMstack, the co-founders start a podcast. Everyone knows that new shiny new startup.

But a thousand miles away, there’s a maker. Absolutely zero to no cash, knows little PHP, and has heard the word accessibility only twice. If you don’t know this story, don’t worry, I made it up.

Before I go on,

Which party do you think is in a better position to focus value for the customer from day 1?

I choose the later and I’ll tell you why

Waste.

I know what you’re thinking now… You’re thinking

We can’t call what startup A does waste because it’ll save them marketing dollars.

I absolutely agree on that, but why would you want to save marketing dollars on a product no one wants?

How easy is it to listen to a customer when you have 7 Nodejs engineers writing about how they moved the company’s blog to Gatsby in order to save 0.5ms load time?

“Waste is anything that does not create value for a customer” — Eric Ries.

How easy is it to pivot or go home when you learn users don’t need what you’re building? For the PHP developer, it’s just a folder and some apache credentials. But for our startup with 7 engineers and a cat, it might mean a lot more.

If the goal of a startup is to learn about the customers from day 1, whatever doesn’t directly generate knowledge about the customer is a waste of effort, time and resources.

But I’m curious now… what does value mean for our customers? And where does providing a single source of truth (design systems) come in?

Value.

Most customers don’t want to know how a thing is built. It’s funny, but it’s true. Humans are so selfish that we just want things to work well for us. We don’t want to know how you provide value for us. Just take my money and do it.

Let’s say our PHP guy wants to help pregnant women reach medics faster, all he has to do is “be better or faster than what they use now”. That’s valuable to them. And most times, it can take him less than a weekend to build. He doesn’t have to think about how slow, old or insecure PHP is. Those things don’t matter to the customers, They’re selfish. How you create value is not a problem. Just do it and if it’s better than what we have now, they’ll pay you.

Measuring value.

Photo by Charles 🇵🇭 on Unsplash. Please pass.

How should startups know if they’re providing values for customers? I can think of a few now

1. Users are paying.
2. A lot of people are talking about how it’s making their lives easier.
3. More People are using the product.

As easy as this might sound, it’s easy to be caught up in vanity metrics like

1. The number of employees.
2. Tech stack and Number of builds daily.
3. Availability in countries.
4. Cash raised.

It’s easy to get lost in these waters because that’s how the outside world measures value. But a startup that’s customer-driven is focused on how to provide value. They know other things will come afterward.

This is part of my efforts to put my thoughts out and get them refined. If they resonate with you, I’ll be writing a few more like these coming Fridays. Here’s a peek

1. Why I’m learning PHP in 2019.
2. I think PWAs are the best things to happen to the internet.
3. My affair with Typography.

Stay tuned. I’d love to know your thoughts while reading. Put them below and let’s figure this out together. I’m also a slight noise maker on Twitter.