Startups put a lot of pressure on their leaders to make the right choices. It's a stressful position to be in. You're responsible for a team, a product, and a vision, and the margin for error feels razor thin. But there are a few key strategies that will help you focus on what matters and strip away the noise that slows most founders down.
Be ready to change
Being an entrepreneur you need to be always hungry for feedback and be ready to change. It is one of the most important ideas that you can grab and especially as a technology leader. The one who is willing to change will evolve the business. Stubbornness kills more startups than lack of funding ever will. In the early days the scope of change is massive as you are more flexible with it. Making small and large changes enables ultimately finding product-market fit. Your first version of anything is almost certainly wrong. The founders who succeed are the ones who treat every piece of customer feedback as data, not as a personal attack on their vision.
Find your product-market fit
Modern cloud deployment platforms give you the ability to get your ideas in the hands of users faster than ever before. With tools like this, you can focus entirely on building your product as users are interacting with it, so you can learn from those users as quickly as possible. Product-market fit is not a milestone you announce at a press conference. It's the moment when customers start pulling the product out of your hands instead of you pushing it on them. You know you have found it when retention curves flatten, when users start telling their friends, and when the same feature requests keep coming in from different people. Until that happens, everything else is a distraction. Premature scaling before finding fit is one of the most reliable ways to burn through capital and lose a team's trust.
Don't make it a secret
Startups used to build their product in secret, and won't show it to anyone for fear someone else will steal their idea. This mindset is more dangerous than any competitor. But we have to accept the fact that people are not sitting around, just waiting for a great idea they can steal and then build. Ideas are abundant and execution is scarce. Our idea is not just ours. There might be other people who are working on similar lines. The best thing you can do isn't to work on it in secret, but to build it, and get it in front of customers as fast as possible. Sharing your idea early invites feedback that actually makes the product better. It also attracts collaborators and early adopters who feel invested in what you are building. Secrecy is a comfort blanket, not a competitive advantage.
Build a business plan
Build three step planning. You need to plan your next step, build it, and get feedback. If needed, amend the plan. Repeat it all wherever and whenever needed. This is not about writing a fifty-page document that gathers dust. It is about having a clear hypothesis for what you are testing next and being disciplined enough to measure the result. You're always wrong about something or the other in your business. Your only strategy at this point is to be wrong as fast as humanly possible so that you can find out what right is and start building the right thing.
Keep the cyclic order of building, executing, and getting feedback at whichever stage it is needed. It's only in the feedback cycle that you'll learn where you're wrong and start to get right. The founders who last are the ones who stop trying to be right and start trying to learn fast. That distinction makes all the difference.
