What is a Startup Studio?
“Startup studio, also known as a startup factory, or a startup foundry, or a venture builder, is a studio-like company that aims at building several companies in succession. This style of business building is referred to as ‘parallel entrepreneurship’.”
The startup world is driven by a fairly well known formula: you come up with an idea, you build a product based on your idea, your business succeeds — or more likely fails — and you repeat.
But for a couple of years now, a new model has arised: ‘Startup Studios’ or ‘Startup factories’. They come up with a bunch of ideas, test them all, fail at many, but some succeed.
That’s how we do thing at Make it also. However, Make it is one of the few studios in the world who opens up the possibility to build a startup to the public. We aim to Test, Build, Fund and Grow ideas generated by the general public, while other studios usually focus on their own projects.
The advantages of launching your business WITH a Startup Studio
It’s our business to build businesses. We’re not romantic about ideas, we just want to build startups that work. It’s much better to fail fast, than to work on a project for years without creating any traction. We believe that our/your opinion in whether a project is good or bad does not matter. The only deciding factor in a startups success is the market itself. Startup Studios remind entrepreneurs of that and make sure everyone involved stays objective.
One thing a Startup Studio can really help with, is to speed up the process of building a startup with shared resources. Their biggest asset is its people and its experience with a variety of different ventures. We know WHAT to do, HOW to do it AND we EXECUTE also. So really what you’re paying for is: More experience, less risk, faster work and a lower overhead cost (compared to hiring someone). While when you do it on your own, you need to find the right partners and most likely hire people with few experience in the Startup world/mindset, which can be very costly in the longer term.
How to Lean Startup
It’s not only the name of our blog, It’s also our most developed area of expertise. “Lean” or “Agile” are terms you’ve probably heard flying around before, implementing it in your business, or adapting to that mindset is a very different story.
Perfection is the enemy of progress
To really understand what Lean means, it’s useful to look at the most common method businesses are runned, called ‘waterfall’. Waterfall means that the outcome of a project is very well defined. The client knows exactly what he/she wants. Based on that project description, the company will make a time/pricing estimate and execute the project. Here’s an example of what that workflow could look like: The project enters the company in one department, once that department has done its job, they pass on the project to another department, then they pass it along again, and so on, until the entire scope of the project is is completed.
Agile is quite the opposite. A project enters the company, and the first step is to estimate the scope of the project. The client sets the time and price of the project and based on that, you estimate what you can build with those resources. It’s a game of prioritizing, really understanding what value you want to bring to the market, understanding that you can’t build a ‘perfect’ looking project with the resources at hand and that that’s ok!
Agile has multiple advantages over the waterfall system:
- Your product/service will be on the market faster
- Decreases financial risk
- Trains you to see your product/service from the market’s perspective
- Only build the Features you really need (in waterfall systems, on average, 70% of the features build are never or rarely used)
Conclusion
A ‘Startup Studio’ is a company made to build companies. They develop businesses in an ‘Agile’ or ‘lean’ way. The biggest asset of a Startup Studio is its people, experience and mindset. Some Studios — like Make it — make their expertise available to the everyone who has a great idea.
What is Make It?
We build Startups. Since 2014, we’ve successfully developed what we describe as ‘a machine’ to test, launch and/or grow startups by working with over 200+ entrepreneurs and building our own. We strongly believe in the ‘Test It’ mentality: test fast, fail cheap, and try again.
Are you ready to Make it happen?
