Focus and Startups

Focus is central to every startup... but probably not for the reasons you think.

A startup is unfocussed when they do not know where they want to go. Basically, missing a “positioning" for all involved - internal and external. A broad objective which could lend a direction. A product team needs to have clarity on what to build, customer success teams need this to help the customers to get the best out of your product, HR requires this to help build a team with purpose, and Sales needs clarity to sell the vision. Externally your investors should know what have they invested in, and similarly, your customers need to know what they are buying. In essence, this "direction” is something everyone associates you with. Something the startup wants to be known for.

It is okay to change with enough data, where a startup wants to go, but they cannot eye multiple places at the same time. There exists a multitude of examples around this. e.g. startups trying hard in parallel on many fronts, or trying to solve multiple parts of a complex process or workflow all by themselves, or trying multiple geographical before sufficiently exhausting the primary, or, an overwhelming set of feature set, or simply build a solution in search of a problem (instead of the other way around).

The obvious reasons this does not work are:

• The team energy gets spread thinly on multiple initiatives, creating mediocracy in each one of them.
• Every silo has a different idea on what they are building, hence not conducive to a common goal or direction. e.g. development does not know what they are building and for whom, marketing does not know the target segment/industry, and sales don’t know what they are selling, and of course without the necessary support from the rest of the company.
• Investors have to wait eternally to see the proof points in solid customer use and consistent revenue.
• A brand is difficult to establish as prospective customers are unable to box you into something, and the organisation looks like a generalist.

All the above are derived from good common sense (and should be anyway avoided), but something else ingrained in focus beats them all. 

It is the lack of “collective” worry when your product does not work. This is the necessary “missing" panic which should hit the team due to the lack of coherency and alignment to a single objective so that they can do something about it.

Let's expand. 

A startup is a collection of hypothesis and assumptions. It is the team's responsibility to continually reduce risk by validating these assumptions as soon as practically possible with data. As an example, when a product is not getting enough traction or, use in the field, it should increase the urgency for the team to uncover why. The potency of this "why" is the million-dollar question which makes or breaks a startup. 

The understanding of this “why” and a resolve to fix it is a “collective” team play. No problem is hard, but needs to be built upon honest appraisal of what’s going on the product, and against a specific user scenario. If the team is not able to pin down what are they building and for whom, the prognosis will be blurry and unfortunately, any resultant fix will also be ineffective.

In the presence of multiple initiatives and products/segments, the team is naturally inclined to seek and derive external reasons for why this would have not anyway worked and hopes something else will work out.

Now the same story in reverse.

Assume you were working on a single product vertical and are lucky to get some traction. This means someone found your product useful, and there is a need established. The path to product-market fit is to make some clients extremely satisfied and then find more clients like them. These clients will provide generous feedback because they are loving your product for something specific and important, it is solving for them. They will also see your organisation committed to the problem you are solving for them. This is huge.

So, now think about your startup and reflect. Are you guys all focussed and committed to making one thing work? 

If this is not the case, unfortunately, it is the case of five blind men and an elephant all over again.