As a company founder you are responsible for everything that happens in your company from product development and sales, to HR and legal. As a result you constantly find yourself having to do new things, things that you may never have thought about doing. It’s a constant learning exercise, which generally takes the course of not getting things absolutely right first time round, but (hopefully) managing to learn quickly enough to fix them before it becomes a problem.
Unsurprisingly every time I make a mistake or have to deal with some unexpected consequence of something I have done, I find myself thinking: “Wow, well I definitely won’t do that again”. With everything that I’ve learnt over the course of the past year this has led to a second train of thought: That I would be so much better at this if I had to start again tomorrow.*
To that end I thought now would be a good time to think again about what I would do if I had to start all over again. I wrote a post with the same title about 6 months ago (“If I knew then, what I know now”), but even since then I’ve learnt so much that I thought it would be interesting to revisit the topic.
Last time I wrote from the perspective of practical steps of how I would start, so this time I’ve decided to focus a little more on what I would start. I still think that everything rests on execution but there are a few key things that I would look for:
(1) Great co-founders – I wouldn’t start anything unless I was working with one or two great people who were working alongside me full-time and just as invested in the business as me. It would also be crucial that between the two or three of us we had the requisite skill-set to be able to execute the idea ourselves. Read this for more thoughts on the importance of and how to find great co-founders.
(2) I would use the product myself – For a start, if you would genuinely use it yourself, you already know that you’re solving a real problem. Second, as a user you have an intuitive sense of how things should work, which makes it easier to know what actually matters when it comes to both functionality and design. See “The Apple exception” for more on this.
(3) I’m passionate/knowledgeable about what I’m doing – It’s hugely advantageous to have a special interest in, or knowledge of, the area you’re working in. But even more critically, if I’m going to spend 5 years of my life doing something, I want it to be something that I’m passionate about and believe in.
(4) A big space – The space you go into sets the upper bound on the business you can build, plus it takes just as much effort to start a new bakery as it does the next Facebook. I would therefore want to make sure I was in a space where there was potential to build a big business.
(5) An obvious business model – It’s important to me to know how I’m going to make money. It’s entirely personal, but I’m not a huge fan of businesses with ad driven or incidental business models. I don’t want to have to acquire 10m users before I have a business model.
(6) Make revenue from day 1 – It’s not the money that matters here. It’s that the ability to get customers and to get people to pay for your product, are the best test of whether your business is going to fly or not. Being able to find this out from the start is invaluable.**
Doing a startup is a huge commitment, and were I to find myself in the position of starting another company tomorrow, these are the things that I would want to be in place.***
* On a side-note, if I was an investor, a large part of my investment strategy would be based around investing in second time entrepreneurs.
** Points (5) and (6) are quite closely related but for me different things i.e., it’s possible to have an obvious business model but not one which can make revenues from day 1. I would want both.
*** It’s really interesting to contrast what matters to me now with the things I thought about before I started this company.
MattJackRob 