The second most important thing
We all have read about the “5 things that kills startups”. The general consensus between investors are that the most important reasons are: fight between co-founders, not being able to raise money, not finding right market, burn rate, not being able to hire, etc.
My little experience tell me there are only 2 things that are important when trying to build a startup: build the product & sell it. Anything else is secondary in importance. The thing is that this are the most difficult things to do in a company, so people prefer to do anything else before having to actual facing this tasks.
Now, how can the people (in the team) get away from this without founders noticing?
“Why did we fail if we were building and talking to users?”. Well, when you dig deeper into what they where actually doing, they were doing the second most important thing inside the only two priorities. So, the way we trick ourselves is by telling us that as long as I'm building part of the product or taking with possible customers, then I’m focus and doing a great job. This could certainly be true unless you are building things that don't matter and no one want. Also, you talking with customers that are not the right people you should be talking to. We lie to ourselves. Over and over again. Because it is too hard and we don't want to face the reality of having to do something that makes us uncomfortable.
How do we lie to ourselves? We build features that don't matter. Two users or customers request something and you leave the hard thing you were focusing and you jump into building that easy feature. You feel good with yourself. You are building product. And you tell yourself that this is what your users want. It is not true! There is a vision of the product in the long term. Is what you are doing focusing in achieving that vision? Are this the customers that will help you go mainstream? Or are they core users that can live without this minor improvements (features)? I think the most clear metaphor I can think of is when people instead of fixing or building the important part of a broken house, go on into painting and trying to flip the house instead of fixing the leaking roof. We lie to ourselves thinking that it’s good enough. It’s not.
The most common way to see this is when startups talk to customers. The first ones are the hardest ones. That is true. But there are not the first ones (believers) the ones that spread the word and create the trust. They are early adopters and innovators* but not ambassadors. The second wave that follow, the ones that trusted the believers, will be the ones that will take the product as their own and spread the word. Here is where we fall in our own trap. As long as they are interested in our product (paid or not, users or customers) we will go and talk to them and tell ourselves: “I’m talking to my users! I’m in the good path.” Even if this is true (again), they are usually not the ones we need to talk to. If they are already buying then we need to talk to keep them (retention) but these true believes won’t take us to the next stage. Is the users in the (tangente) that we need to talk to. Those that will sign up but won’t convert. Those that know about us but won’t trust us yet. The ones that is HARD to talk to because it feels we are all again in the beginging. I know, you will ask: “So, it never get easier?”. No, at least not yet. We all know who we should be talking to but that we are tricking ourselves not to do it. Ask yourself: would this person help me move forward to where I need to be?
