Where To Start With A Startup, Part I:
The Value Behind Your Story
For an entrepreneur, starting a business seems like the equivalent of an artist having a blank canvas. You’ve probably got a great idea and a range of tools to make it happen, but don’t know where to begin. I’ve never started my own business so I wouldn’t know, but I‘ve worked with a few people who have and been with them at the beginning of their journey. The key at this stage is how to get the best out of an idea as well as put the foundations and structure in place for its best chance of long-term success.
The biggest difference between me and the entrepreneurs I work with is usually that they have committed their entire professional and personal lives to this blank canvas. They have invested totally in the belief that their idea has a significant place in the market, and they have the means (or know people who do) to turn a concept into a reality.
So, where to start?
As a designer, I have to counter every inherent urge to start defining the finished product right away. As soon as I have a general overriding concept, my mind starts going wild with what it could be and how it could look in my hands and in front of my eyes. The problem is that the images rushing through my head are all based on preconceptions from the past — things that have already been, based on a plethora of different facts and pieces that all come together to tell a different story. Someone else’s story.
Recently I helped run a three-day workshop with 3 entrepreneurs who have bravely launched themselves into the unknown and started exploring an idea with a ton of potential and very little baggage. This is a key point as with baggage comes limitations, constraints, and tensions, therefore inevitable preconceptions that we’ve established aren’t helpful at this stage.
The purpose of running a short time-restricted workshop is to define the core business proposition and quickly root out and make decisions around fundamental items the idea needs to get to market and gain small numbers of influential customers (known as early adopters). These few customers will help drive and define the shape of the proposition for the foreseeable future and as the customer base grows and the proposition matures so too will the business. But always with the customer at the heart*.
*Your customers are your business, and your business is to provide a service to your customers and satisfy their existing and (as yet) unmet needs. This is a widely accepted concept in the world of business, especially so in the current vacuum of the startup world — but what does it actually mean when it comes down to how a business operates and behaves?
I believe it is placing the customer at the centre of everything you do, and if you’re fortunate enough to have a great idea without deeply ingrained processes, technology stack and financial systems etc already in place then you can do this with immediate effect:
Conduct market research to validate existing assumptions and discover unmet needs (both desktop, 1–2–1 [selective] interviews and community-based surveys)
Define a core set of ‘power users’ (early adopters) that you feel widely represent your intended customer base. They will stress, challenge and help define the product as it evolves over time.
Continue to rely on this (evolving) group of people to validate your hypotheses and future product enhancements as well as evangelise your business to family, friends, and the wider community.
Going back to my original question, where to start?
To borrow a mantra from business leader Simon Sinek, Start With Why. If you want people to buy into your idea then they have to believe what you believe only then do you need to let them know that you have the capability to help make it a reality. The question for our founders is — What were the defining moments that conjured this idea in the first place and the subsequent moments that made you realise you needed to start this business? This description would be the backbone to the next three days and drive many of the (sometimes extremely tough) decisions that would have to be made.
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe” ― Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Once this backbone was in place we could start analysing the factors that will affect the idea and it’s success such as competitors, technology, trends, geographies, partners etc.
Be human: finding our core values
After the initial Proposition Canvas had been laid we thought about where we might want to position the business and the attributes that will eventually build our personality. We tried to think of the business we were building as a human-being and the character we pulled together is a representative of the company as a whole. As businesses are (more often than not) made up of lots of different people with a mix of personalities and characteristics we needed to align on a set of values early on that will represent the business, and there’s no better opportunity to do this while we have the founders together.
Our values and what we believe are what makes us human. We are differentiated by our personalities which are made up of inherent traits and unique life experiences that are reflected in our actions. The same goes for the businesses we build, and our company values are the words or phrases that best define who we are as a business and what we stand for.
We needed to articulate these values in a clear and meaningful way so they drive each and every decision the business makes on it’s journey. If we were to talk what would we say? How would we greet you? What attributes make us different? We’ve all seen company values from the likes of Facebook and Airbnb so it’s hard to avoid just reproducing our values from already successful businesses — therefore, we needed to be more matter-of-fact about the attributes that make us, us. For our founders we used the core business idea, what we do, who we are, what we believe and what we [will] have to offer as drivers for our values. These values will provide stability and support as a point of reference not only for the founders but the employees to come.
Our values are what we want people to understand the business to be, what it stands for and represents — but that takes time and you only get people’s time when you deliver a great service over and over again. So we have two dimensions at play here; 1. great service, and 2. company values. The challenge is the make these two key ingredients sing to the same tune and drive towards a mutual goal of satisfied customers that love the service and buy in to the brand.
As an aside: The brand is evolving throughout this process and will continue to evolve over the coming weeks and months, but I try not to focus too much on the word itself. It has a tendency to make people (like me) jump to the aforementioned preconceptions of what we want the brand to be without first addressing the paramount issues and ensuing tasks. The business should be value and service driven while keeping the key brand elements such as tone of voice, logo, messaging, colour palette, imagery etc in mind as the idea evolves.