How to conquer your startup’s biggest enemy

As an early-stage startup, your deadliest enemy isn’t a competitor — big or small. Instead, it’s an invisible yet intransigent quality called inertia. In this post, I explain how inertia works in the context of early-stage startups and share techniques to harness inertia to your advantage.

Inertia, otherwise known as Newton’s first law of motion, states that “Every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.”

This simple law of nature is also prevalent in our everyday lives. Most of us eat the same food, wear the same clothes, and remain friends with the same people. Humans develop habits, which are nothing but a collection of repeated actions. People are habitual because it helps reduce the energy required to live our daily lives. Imagine spending effort to think about every single step, decision, and behavior throughout the day. It would be exhausting. At the same time, inertia is also the biggest enemy of change.

People in Sales know this principle very well. They’ve developed strategies and tactics to accommodate and harness inertia when it makes sense. That’s also why large companies spend so much time and money in building their brands. A recognizable brand taps into our cognitive inertia and leads us to select products that aren’t necessarily superior to other alternatives.

So, stagnation, my friend, is the norm and not the exception.

Here are a few tips and tricks for how to use customer inertia to your advantage:

Make customer inertia work in your favor

Large enterprises have typically invested years, if not decades, building organizations, systems, and processes. As a startup, you are predisposed to challenging the status quo. Sometimes, it works.

One such example is when you find a champion whose OKRs are based on challenging and revamping their organization’s ways. Leaders charged with digital transformation, as an example, are incentivized to align with your message of change compared to the rest of their colleagues. In other words, you will be harnessing the leader’s inertia, which in this case, is to transform, innovate, and overcome organizational inertia.

In most enterprises, inertia often works against change. Even though engineers love to build new things, integrations with existing — and often arcane — products do not fall in this category. The same goes for features that admins typically want, such as the single pane of glass for observability or UI for budgeting purposes. It turns out that integrations and admin features help reinforce existing organizational systems and structures, or in other words, inertia. If it doesn’t create conflict with your product or strategy, invest in building the “boring” stuff that helps harness inertia — in your favor.

Reduce the energy needed to overcome inertia

Some people do not change in any large enterprise, even when it is called for by senior management. They might not be sufficiently motivated to change or simply fear anything new. Regardless of the reasons, an effective strategy to overcome inertia is to help minimize the energy required to change.

Here are a few familiar examples that are highly effective in overcoming inertia —

• A product that solves real pain as opposed to one that offers fuzzy benefits.
• A product that offers 10x improvement over the status quo because it overwhelms inertia.
• Offering free trials that are also self-serve. It saves all the energy needed to set up meetings with total strangers to learn what a product offers.
• Offering a simple migration pathway to your product from that of an incumbent’s.

Overcome your inertia as well

Since startups are energetic entities, it is not surprising that inertia shows up in startups too.

The most common type of inertia in a startup is a bias towards building stuff. Products are, of course, the currency of innovation. It is no surprise that great startups like to build great new things. This tendency becomes problematic when startups try to compete head-to-head with large incumbents based solely on checklist-like feature sets.

It is foolish for underdogs to compete in games whose rules are set by dominant players. David beat Goliath by changing the nature of the battle so that he had an advantage. Likewise, technical founders need to have the discipline to resist product and technology inertia when it comes in the way of building a successful business.

Specifically, technical founders tend to overestimate the importance of product innovation while underestimating the power of sales and marketing. Rory Sutherland, the legendary advertising executive, said it best: “In the pantheon of human importance, we always accord high status to the inventor and low status to the showman. But almost every significant technology, even vaccination, has required ten times as much effort in the selling as in the conception.”

Understanding how inertia impacts decision making makes it easier for startups to prioritize strategies and develop plans. In severely resource-constrained environments, like your typical technology startup, it’s everyone’s job to harness inertia or overcome it — as the situation warrants. Your company’s success depends on it.