Start-ups are exciting. There are passionate people in hot pursuit of a new, under-appreciated opportunity. There is the uncertainty of success and long odds, along with a compelling vision and the thought that this could really happen!
Start-ups find themselves snaking their way through dense thickets and up narrow paths, perilously clinging to the edge of steep hills. There are obstacles and dangers in every direction, many of them only avoided by quick reactions and decisive actions.
The pioneers of a start-up are, well, pioneering. They're discovering new territory every day. They learn to be creative, because if they fail to embrace the new, their venture fails.
It's all about going where people haven't gone before. Your theme song had better feature words like quick, new and creative. Slow, careful and conservative had better be attributes of other groups.
Most start-ups never really get started-up. Or they take off and fizzle quickly. Or something happens; in any case, it doesn't really work out.
Things aren't even all in the clear for the few start-ups that manage to get real traction in the market. All too often, the people who discover a wonderful new field of gold...
...find in retrospect that all their efforts amounted to building big neon signs with blinking arrows, signs that say: "Attention established companies: There is gold right over here!" Having discovered gold and brought everyone's attention to it, the start-up is unceremoniously elbowed aside as the established companies, with their organizations and big machines, move in and actually mine the gold.
And then there are the real winners. Part of the outside world starts to give them respect and another part (the part that feels threatened) says nasty things about them. They have real revenues and real customers. The market recognizes that they have something new and different, and a substantial and growing part of the market wants that new and different thing.
You might think that at this stage, everyone can breathe a sign of relief. We're on easy street now! It's true that the odds of ultimate success are way higher than they were before. But there are some HUGE mistakes that are made all too often at this point. In particular, there are important behavior and focus changes that need to happen in order to continue on the path to success.
Here are a couple of the most frequent things that go wrong:
Innovation Scope and Focus
When your venture has built up a head of steam, when it's really barreling down the tracks, the worse thing that can happen is to go off the tracks! But this can happen really easily if you haven't changed your innovation focus from "we're in the woods; there are lots of scary animals and danger on all sides; let's look everywhere and innovate about everything" to "we're on a roll; we've got customers and momentum; let's focus on the track ahead and confine our innovation to rolling down this track more effectively."
If you're not focused on the track ahead and concentrating your innovation on it, chances are you'll go off track.
Innovation Process
When you're small and don't have much to lose, your team communicates closely and changes focus quickly. If you've got an opportunity, it makes sense at this stage for everyone to drop what they're doing and jump on the new thing that could put you on the map.
But now that you've built up a real herd of cattle and more people are involved, things are tougher.
You've got to set up a system that allows you encourage pioneers, but assures that their efforts are mostly productive. You've got to encourage fresh thinking, but somehow assure that an unfortunate innovation doesn't blow up on you and cause the cattle to stampede. You can't (and don't want to) control everything, but you've got to introduce a form of light-weight process that enables a larger group to continue to innovate freely, while guarding against disaster and minimizing waste.
Customer Focus
When you're getting started, your focus is naturally on the great sea of people out there who aren't your customers but could be. You're all about new customer acquisition (if your business is a web site, this means building UV's as you concentrate on SEO and SEM). When you've got traction of the kind we're talking about, you've got quite a number of people who already are your customers (for a web site, this means people who don't arrive via search or a link from another site). This is great, it's what you wanted.
What you should do at this point is gradually shift your focus to the people who are already your customers. Instead of putting all your effort into looking for new fertile fields, recognize that you've got some really fertile fields, and your job is to cultivate those fields.
It's true that pioneering and hunting got you where you are. But now that you've actually arrived in the promised land you were searching for, isn't it time to shift gears, gather and cultivate?
Summary
You've gotten to where you are by concentrating the efforts of a small team on no-holds-barred innovation to discover and build a customer base. You've got a bigger team now and lots of customers who like what you are already giving them. Make it your first priority to keep what you've got, adding "preserve and protect" to your vocabulary. Your business now depends on the customers you've already won -- their needs (in most cases) come before the needs of customers you don't yet have!
You've found the pirates' gold. Do you ALL need to rush off in search of more gold? Can't you manage to guard what you've got, not to mention invest and grow it?