Sunday Evening Thought #3
How we as tech founders like to think the startup world works and how it actually does.
This XKCD comic on the left exemplifies the reality of the tech world we live in from the two different vantage points of the main populations that inhabit it.
Those with tech smarts and those with street smarts. And sometimes those that manage to have both.
For how much people love to talk about the innovation and design side of Steve Jobs, he was also a ferocious salesperson and marketer. A pure unapologetic capitalist who was always willing to go father than his competitors would go in any situation, because he believed his company deserved to exist more than theirs did. He was tech smarts meets street smarts.
A local tech entrepreneur here in Chicago is 20 months in with a team of 85 employees already. Bootstrapped, cash-flow positive, and on pace for $10M ARR for 2016. I asked this founder what the majority of the hires were in that 85 and was surprised with the answer: call center sales reps. Wasn’t engineering, design, marketing, etc… critical for them as a tech startup?
“Seth… I can sell $1 bills all day for 90 cents like my competitors or I can build a real sales team and start selling what I have today at a profit and focus on sustainability. I choose to go to market before my product was where I wanted it to be because I knew we had to get customers on it, paying real dollars today, not hypothetical dollars tomorrow. We will keep building the tech as we go, but I focused on revenue and our competitors focused on raising rounds of funding to cover their burn and building neat stuff.”
Because of Technori, I have been spoiled with getting to meet countless founders over the last 5+ years. From the hundreds of teams on stage to our keynote speakers to our huge network of thousands of supporters and friends. One thing sticks out to me over and over.
The startups who I met that talked about nothing but features, their engineers, their competitor’s technology, and their talks with investors, seemed to consistently be the ones to fail. To run out of cash and evaporate into the ether.
The startups I met who spent maybe 15% of the time talking features and the other 85% on their customer acquisition techniques, sales, marketing, and sustainability, seemed to be the ones that consistently survived. Many of those who I talked with 3, 4, 5, 6 years ago, are thriving to this day.
I no longer believe that’s coincidental. That it’s some random correlation that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
When I look back, it’s the founders who possess both tech and street smarts that are the dangerous ones. The ones that will consistently crush the “tech smarts only” founders every day. The ones I will support any day of the week.
PS — This was the final post of my 31 day writing challenge. Yay!
Sunday Evening Thought #1
Sunday Evening Thought #2
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This article was written from scratch and published the same day as part of a 31 day writing challenge. To follow me on Medium through this writing challenge, go here:https://medium.com/the-writing-challenge
