After having drawn up your business plan, focus on your team and then how to arrive on the market as quickly as possible.
“If you’re stalling with meticulous attention to perfect a winning business plan, and convince so that the model of your company is healthy and will lead to success, stop!” These are the words of William Hsu, co-founder and managing partner at the start-up accelerator MuckerLab.
Hsu, formerly successful entrepreneur and manager of AT & T and eBay, says startups are a society is “a career for people truly irrational. In all likelihood, whatever the idea, it will fail. Entrepreneurs, however, self-convince themselves and their employees through the construction of an imaginary reality made of powerpoint documents and spreadsheets.”
That said it gives us a few tips:
1. Think about the people, not ideas
Forming a great team is more important than having a great idea, always. “None of us is perfect, and entrepreneurs are usually very good at doing two things: to have vision and take risks.”Entrepreneurs, especially in the technology sector, are at one of two flavors: Either they are like Steve Jobs, the visionary who can truly understand the market, but not technically proficient, or are like Steve Wozniak, technical geniuses who do not understand or customers or the market.
In both cases, the team members must be able to fill the areas where the entrepreneur does not excel. “We look for three things in a potential startup: the market, the team and the idea. The team is by far the most important, followed by the market. The idea itself is certainly the least important component. ”
2. It aims to speed, not to perfection
Whatever assumptions you make on the market, it is probably wrong by definition. Only one of 30 startups succeeds, and this of course is only possible if this startup is actually founded. It means that entrepreneurs need to put a product on the market as quickly as possible, in any form, even if it meets only 10% of the original Vision. You have to test it to assess how it is received by the market, if the customer goes to the genius and it is something for which they are willing to spend.
Then, he says, you can stop to reconfigure it as a function of market response. The concept is that the more tests you do the better chance you have of being successful.
Precisely because of this need to work quickly, Hsu recommended to build an internal team that has all the skills of design, technical, and product that you may need. “Outsourcing these functions would result in a constant outflow of capital for each new version of your project. Each evolution should bring you closer to success, not failure.”
3. Think about the vision, not the ground
“A lot of entrepreneurs have a perfect set of slides, a perfect business plan and a perfect economic model. But this is often all they have,” says Hsu. “I think that starting a business and having a business plan is the same. But being an entrepreneur also means creating the future one step at a time.”
It means that you should never look forward? Not really, he says. “When the founders are two or more, it is important to put down on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard the key points on which everyone agrees and is necessary to agree on the vision of the company and on the model that will make possible the achievement of success. But you need not spend a lot of time trying to put it in writing on a 40-page document. It would be much more profitable use that time to talk to customers in more than 10, rather.”