On the Topic of “Just Starting”

Posted by | August 12, 2013 | Uncategorized | No Comments

I was recently reading my LinkedIn group and saw a reference to a new book on lean business startups.

As a Lean Planner, I was immediately concerned that this “Just Go For It” approach could really hurt some folks just getting started.

Starter Inc. is all about Lean Planning — just the exact right amount of planning and “business operations” processes to run the company in a highly efficient (striving for optimally efficient) manner.

While it is not all that difficult of an approach, certainly compared with old-school business doctrine, achieving an efficient lean startup simply does not happen by accident, and this whole “shoot first ask questions later” approach is a great way to pile new risks onto a new company before it has even survived a day.

So when I clicked on Just-Start.com, I was struck by the premise on their website as somewhat disingenuous — the website header saying that this is a “world in which you can no longer plan or predict your way to success” — but the book does lay out a basic “four question” plan which, while minimalistic, is in fact the initial “cost/benefit/risk/reward” analysis that most founders have gone through since the beginning of time.

Overall it seems their advice flies in the face of the business adage “Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail” which has stood the test of time.

They planned for this thing when they built it. The laws of physics still apply.

You *can* plan to be an agile planner after all.. Think about it.

The idea that you can’t learn a *lot* from studying (downloading, buying) your potential competitors’ products, doing thorough market research and designing your product, business, and team with a high level of up-front vision of what you are trying to achieve with all of your efforts (life.)

Leaders must have VISION in order to see beyond this triage, reactive, short-term mentality — if you do not yet possess the ability to visualize your precise path to success into the next year or 2 and how you will do so, there is a good chance you also won’t see the risks and factors that lead to your businesses failure.

Even in the most “Agile” of business ecosystems — software development teams — it is well understood that the cost of mistakes is much higher in the development than in the planning phases. Think about building a bridge. Is it easier to change a blueprint or a replace a flaw in a tower after the bridge is built? And what about after it’s being used in a daily commute? Then even more is at stake, perhaps at just the wrong time for a young company.

To the extent that there’s a problem that even needs solving by “Just Start” — I think the takeaway is that planning itself must transform and become more agile, and to that extent I agree with the “Just Start” folks in the iterative and “customer-focused” approach to adaptive business *running* and learning — which is different from startup planning.

Unlike running a business, to *create* the business, aka to “Just Start” it, without planning for it, in my opinion, is a huge mistake — if nothing else than because the rigor and discipline of the process will help you avoid mistakes much harder to correct down the road.

Before starting my latest venture — a Mobile Humor App called Chukles — I did extensive market and competitive analysis, created a provisional patent which detailed every nook and cranny of the product so it could easily be explained to investors and developers as well as IP protection. From there I advocated and sold the idea, gathered an essential team (dev/legal) defined the Cap Table for equity, formed the proper type of corporation for the proper exit we had envisioned in the timeframe we are targeting.

At every stage of the game I can measure the SWOT analysis against the Risks I am pulling off the table, one pawn at a time.

This “toes-in-the-water” without thinking things through to an exit has a subtle danger — you might just succeed in winning some customers, leading to false hopes and unachievable expectations.

Don’t Play Checkers at a Chess Tournament! This is your life after all, not some trivial experiment. I would argue that indeed, small steps DO often lead to customers and initially that seems like success. Sometimes, happily it grows from there.

But depending upon your situation, initial customers — especially big accounts — can have a high support cost, become demanding and increasingly drive your efforts.

So in this product example, in the end you end up becoming an outsourced “subsidiary” of a bigger company doing what they have in mind, not having your own plan because you were just “testing things” when you took on the customer. The end-stage problem here is that you can go on like this for years and if your product at that point becomes less strategic to the customer, you can be left stranded in a dead end while the customer cuts their expense (you) and moves on.

Many initially successful “mom and pops”, restaurants and the like, eventually fold up from exhaustion and death by a thousand cuts. There is always a fresh new restaurant opening down the block. You’ve seen this, you know it’s true.

So, “Measure Twice, Cut Once”, people. These words of advice are not going to change because suddenly today we have mobile phones or big data, and folks at large companies are finding it hard to adapt a department that’s been running for 30 years does not mean they know what is good for starting a new company that needs to plan for its life ahead. less…

About John McMahon

John is a serial entrepreneur and full-stack developer. John is currently CEO of Starter Inc. a mobile and web development company, and is the founder of Humor Me Inc. maker of the Chukles consumer mobile humor app. John also currently serves as the CTO for MatanzasGroup, a Global Pharma Consulting Firm. John founded Extentech in 1998, growing it into a leading Web 2.0 spreadsheet tools vendor. In 2012, John sold his 100% stake of Extentech to Infoteria Corporation -- a publicly listed Japanese company. John has recognized expertise in startups, mobile and web development, open source, and cloud computing. John has been a contributor to Accounting World and has been interviewed and featured in stories on PandoDaily and Forbes.com.

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