Michael J. Sikorsky | Reports Greatly Exaggerated

A friend of mine has just wrapped up her 1st startup. She has asked to remain anonymous as she wants to share these lessons but she means no ill-will to the others involved. [1]

Lessons Learned
Below are some of the lessons learned from my first startup experience. Most of them are probably misguided, inconsistent, or a product of my own inexperience. But I want to share them with you so that you can avoid some of the same mistakes.

1. Dont outsource product development.

If you cant yell across the room to your product development people, you are at a disadvantage. You simply won’t be able to iterate fast enough. Find someone who believes in the market enough to work beside you, then create a product together.

2. Define actionable, accessible, and auditable metrics for success.

Creating metrics that matter can be daunting (and depressing when you consistently fall short). But without them, you are vulnerable to long periods of ineffective development, misguided strategies, and lag time when iterating. Define actionable (can actually do it), accessible (can get the data easily) and auditable (can the data be trusted) (via Eric Ries)

3. Only enter into strategic partnerships, advisory agreements, or marketing partners if they can affect revenues within one month.

Signing on a strategic partnership with Microsoft won’t make you succeed. VC’s wont care, your customers wont care, and neither should you unless they immediately affect the spreadsheet numbers. Sure, there are proven metrics regarding social proof- but in the long term, people dont pay money for a partnership, they pay money for a product or service. Dont believe me? Steal the logos of Cisco, Google, and IBM and put them on your strategic partners page and measure the difference in sales volume.

4. Just because people invest in you, doesn’t mean your product matters or has a market.

“A fool and his money are soon parted” Substituting “a fool ” with “people” makes this idiom much more accurate. The only thing that will validate your product or service is your customers. Having money to invest doesn’t mean that they have expertise in your space, and it certainly doesn’t justify your product.

5. Stay on loop- Invent, Market Test, Create, Measure, Iterate.

Better minds have come up with better models for basically the same thing (see OODA loop ), but this is from my perspective. Invent an idea first. Thats the easy part. The most crucial mistake that I made again and again was skipping the market test phase and simply building a cool product. Its easy to create really cool stuff, but if no one wants them, it doesn’t matter. After creating the initial product, find a way to measure it (see Lesson #2) and then start iterating to make it better.

6. Product development first, everything else, second.

I continually fall short on this. “We need better design”, ” A better outreach strategy”, ” Lets change that logo, and that color”. I love branding, but at the end of the day, Kiva didn’t have a great social media strategy and Google has a terrible logo .

7. Surround yourself with people that don’t agree with you.

Echo chambers are caustic. Ask the annoying people who you don’t like to try out your product. You probably don’t like them because they are not like you, which means they don’t think like you, which means they fill blind spots. This can be highly valuable. I cant even begin to list the times I have discounted someone’s opinion because I didn’t agree with them. That’s dangerous.

8. Create a structured environment with creative outlets (chaortic).

Dee Hock wrote the book on this topic (literally), so I wont go into too many details. But the gist of it is this- Humans need to have structure to get things done. But to truly allow people to excel consistently, structure is optimized when coupled with freedom and creative license. If you want a great example, watch this video of the most creative people on the planet.

9. Fail early, often
Cuban has a great insight on this . In business, you only have to be right once. Its not the same in school, sports or other pursuits. The same goes for product development. The more often you can create a product people don’t want, the sooner you can find out what they do want.

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[1] It will probably take me another year or two before I can write mine up from #5.