You are a startup because you don’t know what works, if you do, then you don’t qualify to be called a start up. You are a either trying to do an old thing in a new way or trying to do something that doesn’t exist at all.
Inasmuch as you have done research and have some hypothesis, you still don’t know what works by experience, it’s still all speculation until you have your own data. So as a startup, you must be ready to adapt to the realities of the market. Nobody is trying to take you out of your goal, you are just discoing the truth and aligning to it.
As a startup, you have 3 main duties; Discover, Align and Scale- in that order. So you have done extensive market and competitors research with solid user and UX research and have come up with some “assumptions” otherwise known as hypothesis. The next thing you need to do is to “test” them and when you want to test, you don’t test with all your resources but you need to test with something exactly like the solution you want to give for your test results to be credible. That’s what gave birth to MVPs.
MVPs help you test your solution without getting burnt. I will talk extensively in this in another post. So when your MVP is in the market. Don’t be surprised when things don’t go as planned. In fact, you should be more careful when they do. Align as much as you can to what the market is telling you, don’t fight it. And when you have properly aligned and the bulk of your users can’t do without your solution, you begin to scale it, exponentially.
If your solution cannot scale exponentially then you are not a startup, you may just be an business, entrepreneur, freelancer or hustler. After you have now consistently solved this problem for a while, ou now need to put in structures to run the business. Your “sales” is quite steady and not an issue, at this point you cease to be a startup.
There is a need for people to understand these foundational things while building to help better manage expectations.
Did you learn anything from this?