Startupping: Lessons Learned

From http://www.startupping.com/2007/02/20/best-and-worst-decisions-part-1/

I’ve made loads of mistakes so I’ll try to think of one with a good lesson for startups - one of the biggest mistakes I made in a previous company was accepting a high dollar contract once for something that wasn’t core to the vision of the business we were running at the time. While the revenue initially feels great, there’s nothing worse than pursuing a piece of business that isn’t core to the startup’s vision. Lesson learned - once you decide what it is you are going to do, don’t pursue efforts that distract from the vision.

This is  pretty much what we do every few months. We’ve been trying to launch a new product since October. Every time the same damn thing happens:

1. Set aggressive schedule
2. Realize schedule is too aggressive/we’ve underestimated requirements
3. Pad out schedule some
4. CRISIS! Schedule is blown
5. Meander off on tangents
6. Reconvene to try to get back on track
7. GOTO 1

We’ve tried 3 launches of $NEWPRODUCT: one in late summer of last year, then October of last year, then this month.

Guess what we haven’t launched.

The biggest problem is we accept work outside our core business: because it’s a lot of money, typically, but also because small businesses (as opposed to “startups”) tend to have a deep-set fear of turning down work. We have to start doing that, or we’ll never launch, and if we never launch we are possibly depriving ourselves of even greater growth (revenue and overall).