Be prepared to kill the sacred cow...
For sure, startups need a strong founding vision - but reality rarely follows the original script.
Vision is everything. It’s your North Star - it drives you forward, inspires the team, attracts funding, and (hopefully) pulls in customers. But Sometimes, the thing you wanted as your USP turns out to be your ball and chain. The faster you can acknowledge that and pivot, the better your chances of delivering growth.
And there can be no sacred cows.
We launched YPlan with the firm belief that highly curated, last-minute mobile-first ticketing would change how people discovered events. Our simple proposition was to offer tickets for today or tomorrow. A host of other startups shared this hypothesis. Like us, some eg Explovia, HoyPlan (seriously - it was a shameless Argentinian rip off of us even down to the logo!) and Time Out, covered multiple event categories from comedy to sport. Others like Dice and (my most recent employer) TodayTix, remained razor-focused on one specific vertical which, with hindsight, was far more successful.
Our product and data science teams A/B tested the hell out of every one of hundreds of facets in every YPlan release, and we obsessed over the event page conversion rates - and how we could influence them. We constantly adjusted our pricing, content mix and UX on the fly - and we were ruthlessly disciplined about culling inventory that failed to engage - even if the supplier relationship was important, or if WE thought the content was cool (chess-boxing - Google it!). It was all in pursuit of the secret-sauce content-mix to drive early engagement.
But it wasn't working.
Whatever we tried, adoption was a huge challenge. We started to compromise by listing inventory categories that - although we instinctively thought were less inspiring (eg cinema) - we knew led to good audience engagement and repeat purchase rates.
But despite the data we steadfastly refused to compromise on our original, last-minute / mobile-only / multiple-category hypothesis. We only introduced longer-range booking windows and web booking when it was too late: by that point we were burning cash from too many market launches. (London, NYC, San Francisco, Vegas, Edinburgh.)
Who remembers that Slack started as a failed multiplayer game, and the chat tool the team built to communicate became the product? Or that Facebook and Youtube started as dating sites? Instagram started as a Foursquare check-in app but the founders realised all the users cared about was photo-sharing. Twitter was a podcasting platform. The common theme is their founders weren't afraid to pivot.
The point is this: vision isn’t about stubbornly clinging to your first idea. It’s about identifying the problems and being brave enough to act on them - even if it means walking away from something you poured your soul into. It's that which makes the difference between failure and a $44Bn exit.
The traditional lean methodology approach of <build MVP - launch - validate - iterate> still stands, but - these days - validation and iteration need to happen simultaneously rather than retrospectively. Early-stage success belongs to those who can stay nimble and treat iteration as a core competency, not an afterthought.
And those who are prepared to kill their sacred cows.
