How to Build Momentum for Your Startup Idea
Two weeks ago I published The Startup Idea Matrix to help founders with the brainstorming part of the startup journey. I thought I’d take some time to write about what comes after you find an idea that inspires you — specifically, how to build momentum for your idea.
Over the past 7 years as founder and investor, I’ve met a lot of talented founders who were just getting started on big ideas. Some have gone on to build billion-dollar companies and others never even got started.
What separated the two groups? Over time, many things. But initially I’d argue it was the ability of some to generate momentum from a point of rest, while others failed to build momentum.
Momentum is arguably the scarcest, but most valuable, asset in the startup ecosystem.
Big companies have momentum built into their businesses, so it is easy to take its value for granted. You don’t have that luxury as a startup. The default state of any new startup idea, no matter how great, is for nothing to happen with it. That is, unless you can create enough momentum to move past the fragile, momentum-less stage of a company.
Here are a few ways to build momentum in the earliest days before you even build a product:
1. Tell everyone about your idea
Talking with other people fans the fire of your idea like oxygen. Keeping the idea to yourself increases the likelihood it will flame out.
Conversations build energy around the idea by forcing you to spend mental cycles on it. You must refine the pitch to the essence of what is exciting about it, develop responses to pushback, and build clarity around why you have conviction in the idea. Having ongoing conversations also ensures you don’t fall for the easiest trap to lose momentum — simply forgetting about the idea and moving on to something else. This is also why it can be hard to start a company while holding a full-time job — your mental cycles inevitably shift elsewhere and you lose momentum.
Beyond that, telling people about your idea increases the serendipity that leads to even more momentum.
Before we wrote a line of code to build Oyster, we met with about 50 people in the books industry to learn — authors, agents, publishers, and readers. I asked every person I met to connect me with a few other people they respected in the industry. This resulted in more conversations with knowledgeable people, and more momentum for the company.
In fact, years later some of our most important company milestones could be attributed back to people we met in these initial meetings.
2. Write a business plan
I started my company in 2012. When I first talked about the idea with a friend, he told me to write a business plan. I was a bit surprised. 2012 was the height of the lean startup and minimum viable products (MVPs). Who had time for a business plan? Wasn’t that for MBAs?
It turns out that business plans and MVPs are not mutually exclusive. Writing the plan for Oyster was a critical exercise. It forced me to think holistically about the idea and built a lot of momentum. In the smallest way, it made the company real. It also gave me something to share with people who were interested in the idea.
I think a business plan can take many forms, and you should do what is right for you. But the output should capture all the reasons you are excited about the idea, and track open questions and action items.
Besides, if you don’t enjoy spending 20 hours writing a well-constructed document about the business, you may not enjoy working on it for 5–10 years. And if you do, you build that much more conviction.
3. Commit and collect data points
Exploring a new idea takes time. You have to constantly collect new data points that inform your decision, one way or another, on if your idea is truly great. Cheap ways to do this include talking to customers, running online surveys, and creating landing pages with different messaging to test the appeal of certain features.
In the early days, one negative data point can swing your outlook dramatically. Over time, you build a critical mass of data and each new data point has less marginal impact. Keep this perspective in mind when you are starting out. Otherwise you could drop a really good idea prematurely.
4. Find a cofounder (or two)
As a sole founder, the business is only moving forward when you are working. When you aren’t working, the business stops, and so does momentum. Working with even one other person doubles the momentum you can create.
Working with another person also creates a sort of two-factor authentication to give up on an idea. It requires both of you to say you no longer want to work on it, and to do so at the same time. If one of you is feeling down, the other can be the optimist, and vice versa. I can’t emphasize enough how important this dynamic is in a startup’s earliest days.
5. Set deadlines
The world runs on deadlines, and startups are no different. Setting deadlines might feel overly formal when you are only 2 people, but is key to building momentum.
It can be helpful to send your cofounder a weekly update of accomplishments every Friday afternoon. This holds you accountable to one another. After all, if your cofounder sends you a big list of accomplishments and you have nothing, you don’t feel great.
Even better if you tell a respected mentor or two about your biggest deadlines to keep you accountable to someone externally. Small pressure like this can make a big difference.
Building momentum for a startup idea is hard, and there are many moments along the way when it is easy to give up. Some of the best companies started as ideas that sounded far-fetched or even downright bad. But the founders were able to build momentum in spite if this, and get beyond the early, fragile stage.
As a founder, it’s important to recognize the critical need to build momentum — and do everything you can to keep it once you have it.
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