Tag Archives: Bob Dorf

The Successful Startup: Transforming Your Vision into Reality

Night sky with dish

The successful launch and growth of your startup depends on the skillful integration of great vision and ideas with execution and commercial know-how. Finding your business or technical complement on day one will help to insure that this becomes reality.

By:  Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Gazing at the night sky can be an inspirational experience.  For some, there is more to this than just naming and tracking the celestial objects in the sky.  Some of the most interesting and bizarre objects in space are invisible to the naked eye (even to the naked eye aided with the most powerful telescope).  The discovery in the 1960’s of the existence of Neutron stars and Black Holes (not visible to the eye) were not only important discoveries in and of themselves but they allowed for some of the most powerful confirmation of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity by allowing the actual measurement of things like the bending of light by gravity among other bizarre predictions from the theory.

What has this got to do with my startup?
The stories that are told about these discoveries take on an almost mythical narrative.  Think Einstein in his patent office in Berne, independently and brilliantly coming up with his radical new ideas about physics by himself in a sudden flash of insight (not entirely true).  The key here is that these ideas would remain obscure theoretical conjectures without the hard work and ingenuity of the experimental scientists that built the instruments and conducted the experiments that not only confirmed the validity of Einstein’s work but have even allowed them to be applied in ways that make our modern technologies work (GPS would not function properly without accounting for the dilation of time due to the stronger gravitational field at the earth’s surface relative to the global positioning satellites, as predicted by the General Theory of Relativity.  If this was not compensated for in your GPS, you would be off course by 10 meters in 1 minute).

Why the ‘Odd Couple’ has a better chance of launching your next product
So as we can see from this example, the successful transformation of a great idea into a practical and valuable product (your GPS) requires the expertise of complimentary but different professionals.  Theorists and Experimentalists are as different from one another as scientific founders are from their business counterparts.  However, it takes the ingenuity, passion and drive of each to make the alchemy work of transmuting a great discovery and idea from the lab bench into a successful product on store shelves (or e-commerce sites).

Getting theory and practice together
It is the rare individual that has all of the qualities that are essential to making a technology based startup a success by themselves (I would posit that this person really does not exist).  It may seem very early to think about the commercial side of your business when you are still working on its technical feasibility.  However, if your vision and dream is to someday create a company to commercialize your discovery, you need to find your business or technical counterpart as soon as possible.

Most Life Science companies are founded by scientists with exciting discoveries from their lab.  These companies often languish for lack of adequate capital to take them to the next step.   A quick look at the companies that are successful in getting the money they need to make this work reveals that, more often than not, they have a strong ‘Odd Couple’ founding team.  Speak with any investor and they will tell you up front that they would much rather invest in an ‘A-Team’ with a ‘B-idea’ than the other way around.  What is an A-Team?  This is a powerful team composed of both technical and business excellence.  This type of founding team insures that the science is backed by a compelling business model (and plan).   Potential investors find these companies especially attractive since the science and business hypothesis are equally strong.  This also insures that the requisite expertise is in place to actually achieve the milestones that have been presented (thereby de-risking the investment some).

Take Home Points:

  • Look for your counterpart on Day 1:  The day you decide that you would like to start a company to commercialize some great new technology, start looking for your business or technical counterpart.  They should share your passion, be innovative and also compliment your own talents.  For example, if you are an introvert, consider finding an extrovert.  If you are a visionary thinker, team up with a detail oriented achiever.
  • Remember it’s the A-Team that gets the cash:  A well balanced technical and business team with great connections has the best chance of beating the odds in the rat-race to win the funding you need to get things off the ground.
  • Keep your eye on the prize:  The many challenges that startups face along with the issues that can arise when working with team members that differ from you can seem overwhelming.  Remembering that everyone on the team (make sure that they do) wants this to be a huge success can help you make the compromises, delegate authority and responsibility and cultivate the flexibility that are essential elements of a powerful A-Team member.

Further Reading:

Picture Credit:  “Satellite Dish Under Starry Night” by twobee, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Startup Product Manager’s Dilemma: Getting the Right Product by Ignoring Some of Your Customers

By:  Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

swiss army knife

Make sure that your product offering has all of the features that it needs to be successful but no more than that.

Figuring out what you first product or service is going to look like, how it will be priced and how you will sell it is at the top of the ‘to-do’ list for the Product Manager of a startup.  As an experienced startup product manager, you have been very careful to balance the enthusiastic advice and suggestions of the founding team with the wealth of feedback that you have gotten from potential customers in the field.  After getting all of this input, you will rarely have an obvious answer to the ‘What is it?, Who wants it? and How much would they be willing to pay for it?’ questions.

Don’t listen (only) to your Sales or Operations colleagues
Everyone on the team wants what is best for the company but you should be wary of your Sales and Operations team members.  From an operations stand point, the fewer the options the better for them.  They are looking to provide the best product at the lowest manufacturing cost with the highest quality.  Every different version of a product or additional set of features introduces complexity into meeting their goals.  On the other hand, your Sales team, as good representatives of your customers and their wants and needs, will want to have as many versions as possible so that they have the ‘perfect’ solution for every one of their customers.  Simply stated, you need to consider both viewpoints as you determine the final feature set or version options of your initial product offering.  The correct answer, of course, is somewhere between 1 and 100 versions or feature sets.

Determining the right number
You may not get this exactly right but you need to be close.  This is why you need to lean toward determining the smallest feature set of your offering that will be compelling to a large enough number of customers.  Another way of looking at this is that you need to determine what product your development team will most easily and quickly be able to produce that is commercially viable.  Running a well-managed alpha evaluation (see ‘Alpha Evaluations: Going from Great Science to Great Products’) will help you to know if you have got the right offering for your launch or if you will need to make changes.  Steve Blank defines this as the High-Fidelity Minimum Viable Product.

“Minimum Viable Product:  (The) simplest minimum viable product (i.e. a website with the core features implemented, a demo version of a physical product)…”   Steve Blank – The Startup Owner’s Manual

Why go small?
Until you have your first sales with paying customers (free or hugely discounted placements don’t count), you will not know if you have got the right product.  The best feedback that you will ever get is from paying customers.  If everybody tells you that you have a great product but nobody will actually buy it, you have the wrong product.  If only a few people will buy your product or after an initial burst of enthusiasm from ‘early adopters’ you find it difficult to grow your sales, you do not have the right product for the customers that you are targeting.  Going small at the beginning will allow you to get valuable feedback from paying customers as early as possible and limits the amount of effort and resources that could be wasted if your first product to market is not quite right.  This allows you and the team to make changes and/or additional features that will allow you to start winning the sales that your great product deserves.  By keeping the initial offering limited, you will still have the resources to make the changes you need to end up with a winning product.

Selected Tips for Getting the Right Product

  • When talking with potential customers, be sure to determine which of their suggestions for your product or service are ‘needs’ and which are ‘wants’.  Your first product should include the smallest configuration or feature set that will satisfy the majority of the consensus ‘needs’ you learned from this group.
  • Use the ‘wants’ and ‘nice to haves’ from your outside feedback to help you to develop a ‘Product Roadmap’ to guide you with future releases of your offering.
  • Make sure that the issue that your product or service aims to fix is compelling enough for people to want to ‘pay to have it go away’.  A product that is just more convenient may not be seen as worth the additional cost by your future customers.  Your discussions with them should focus as much or more on the problem you aim to fix as you do about your proposed ‘fix’.
  • Have an upgrade strategy worked out in advance of your first product launch.  You need to make sure that your earliest customers will have access to the latest versions of your offering that still makes sense for your Revenue Model.  This will help you to deal with any push back from your first customers who may wish to see your product proven by others first.  Being able to offer the chance to be the first one on the block with a viable path for access to future upgrades and releases will significantly help you to deal with this sales issue.

Highly Suggested Reading:

The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company’, By Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, K&S Ranch Publishing Division, 2012.

Picture Credit:  © IbanMontero | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images