“OK”-Weeks are Bad Weeks for Startups

Published in

Startup Battles

5 min readAug 4, 2015

It’s simple: If a startup is only doing okay, there is a good chance it won’t make it through the year. Settling for mediocrity is one of the soft mistakes first-time founders can make.

Have you ever been asked how your startup is doing and answered with something like “Everything’s OK, nothing special”? What were you really thinking? And did you really join or create a startup because you wanted to do OK?

Tech startups, operate in one of the fastest ever changing industries in the world. Things that cost a team years to research, design and develop can often be copied and improved within weeks. No matter how big a tech company is, a group of nerds can challenge it right from the comfort of their couch.

So how good should a team really do to survive the year? The answer is: Definitely not “OK”.

OK is The Little Brother of “Awful”.

Let’s break down a possible lifecycle of the average startup:

#1 Freshness

You have invented something that will change the world. You wake up every day motivated to make it a reality, making huge leaps forward with every step you take. The first prototype is promising, your friends and their friends like it.

#2 Reality (First Midlife Crisis of A Startup)

You are not unique. Competition is better than you thought. You launched the first version, people didn’t stick with it. You need funding to really make it to the market but investors are hesitant and the round is harder to close than you thought.

#3 Success Mountain

Something worked out. Either one of the big media companies picked you up, a big partnership came about or your revenue started to grow.

#4 Opportunity Hill

You did it — you received funding. You are still a small team with a considerable amount of cash in your bank account. This is the most freedom you will ever experience in the life of this project. The world is your oyster.

#5 The OK-Phase

You hire, try out stuff, growth is not super-fast but measurable. This next feature/campaign/hire will make you nail it. Media attention is low, but all in all it’s not worse than before, right?

#6 “F**k, Sh*t, Goddamnit”-Phase

Ok, something went wrong. You need to pull it around ASAP. Everything goes now — what can we change? Let’s slim everything down, let’s be radical, let’s kick ass like we did a year ago!

#7 Crossroads of Entrepreneurship

This is the place where 9 in 10 startups leave the market. Only one will pull it around and head on to a new rollercoaster of ups and downs.

The OK-Phase Can Be An Opportunity For An Early Comeback

Avoiding those stages in the first two years of a startup is almost impossible. One of the biggest improvements a startup can do is seizing the (#5) OK-Phase as a restructuring opportunity to make it as short as possible.

Understand that if nothing happens you are doing something wrong.

A startup is an “organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model“ — It’s an experiment with a huge deadline in form of a cash-filled hourglass. If the startup is doing “OK” it is not learning anything.

You can’t build autonomous landable rockets without crashing a few.

Make your team and yourself understand that each week you are doing OK, there is a lot of room for improvement. One of our team members once said: “If nothing happens inside our company, everything happens outside our company” — words we try to live by.

Of course it’s not up to your iOS developer to decide what feature he/she should implement next, bad output often means bad management. But by giving a startup team awareness of the kind of progress they need to succeed, everyone can report and contribute better to the management decisions.

“Hambone” - The Four Strikes To Determine The OK-Phase:

At our startup, Grape, we’ve introduced the hambone strategy, which is basically a set of questions to get an idea of your startup’s current health.

Did we get more done this week than our competitors?
Easiest way to check if your small and agile team is really exactly that. The biggest advantage you should have as a small startup is your execution speed and (often) the leeway you get from your early adopters for bugs that derived from it.
Did we build anything our users would call awesome?
If you take a picture of your product and your landing page, how much better do they look and function since the last time you checked? If you can’t put the recent changes into a picture there is a good chance that the improvements can’t be communicated to the outside world.
Did everybody exceed their expected output?
This is a question of team culture. A really invested Developer gets everything done that would otherwise block his peers, fixes most of the urgent bugs reported by users regarding the areas he oversees and occasionally pushes and tries some product improvements on his own to improve the product for himself.
Is everyone in the team exceptionally good?
In the end of the day, if you aren’t past your 15th employee, this is one of the most important questions. If you look at your team, is everyone exceptional in the area he/she has been hired for?
If not, do not keep them or your whole team is at risk.

Now you could ask yourself: “Am I doing OK?”

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