Month: August 2010

“And” and How it Can Kill Your Business

Focus is extremely important, especially in the early days of a startup or idea. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the best thing to offer your customers is everything they need. I mean why wouldn’t you want to be the one stop shop for a user’s needs? Then you can be sure they’ll keep coming back for more, right? Unfortunately, it may sound good in theory, but in reality it’s a concept that kills.

The problem is, everytime you add an “and” to a to what you offer you risk proportionally devaluing each other thing you claim to be the best at; which I call value dilution.

Say we are a company that focuses on the very best linens (but then you think: how do I get the linens to the customer – so you continue on) … and we will deliver the very best linens to your door in under an hour. What just happened there is once you started thinking about alternative ways to increase the value of your company you have inadvertently admitted that the “fine linens” part of your company’s offerings isn’t good enough to stand on its own. I have the finest linens – [period]. I am so focused and great at making fine linens you will want them – [period].

Internally, (and here is a point of import) in every conversation and meeting that comes up, if the discussion doesn’t ultimately improve the quality of your fine linens don’t waste your time talking about it until you have the very best linens. Every new offering (if you want it done well) deserves all the attention it needs and will suck attention from another offering unless you have the brand, management, money, exposure, head count, or customer base to help carry your company into a new offering.

No idea is too small to warrant focus. You will be amazed at how deep you can dive into any one concept. The improvements you can bring to a single idea are infinite. There is always as much depth available in any one subject as there is breadth to the number of subjects available to explore.

A side benefit of going deep in one area, as opposed to picking many things to get involved in, is with each iteration of depth you find on any one subject the differentiating knowledge and expertise you gain will grow exponentially.  As a budding startup this exponential gain in knowledge through focus is the far better bang for your buck than compared to the costs of having to learn unrelated points of information when creating new products in new directions.

People try to avoid this law all the time. I’ve heard, “our team is special – we can do it (without more talent or time)” or “why can’t you move all your chess pieces at once?” or “it’s not technically a different focus and blah blah.” Sorry, you can’t avoid this law no matter how smart or hard working you are.  In order to provide the amount of time and energy needed on a each core value  you will need more people, a larger budget and more time (at all levels of the company.) Without it you will give your customers mixed signals, employees contradicting objectives , and a product that can’t compete with a rival that has chosen to focus all its time on one of your things.

When can you add an “and”? I’d say a good rule of thumb is, you can add an “and” when the “and” is not novelle/unique/innovative. Though, often if you are and’ing something that is not innovative then you probably don’t need to “and” it at all. It can come into play when your offering is a novelle way to offer an aggregate of many non-novelle things — but you had better be the best damn aggregator out there and make sure your team works toward that focused goal.

Note: I should make one more point. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have new ideas, just recognize that the new idea will need focus and attention and if you think your original idea/business isn’t good enough to stand on its own then it may be time to decide whether to keep the old business or shift focus completely to the new one. There is a time and place for R&D, and there is a time and place to grow your offering, but without total market fit your “and” should not be added to your core. There is also a difference between supporting features and additional cores that people get confused about a lot – I’ll save that for another post.

Difficult vs. Hard

There is a major difference between difficult and hard for me.  I have noticed that professionals love to say they work hard. Over time it has become a badge of honor. I work harder then you and my parents told me hard work = success and therefore I will be/am more successful. That logic seems so screwy and I followed it for way too long.

I propose that if you work hard you are bad at something. There are always difficult things in the world. It is difficult to create an atomic bottom, or be nice to your mom sometimes, it is difficult to start a company. But when something is hard, you are doing it wrong. Life is easier than I think we realize sometimes and with the mentality that working harder is better than not we fall into this brute force, power through mentality. For instance lifting a tree IS hard and people did it for years, building a pulley system was difficult and made lifting a tree less hard.

There are so many red flags that pop up when this is happening. Talking in circles at meetings, staying up late every night, rearranging your pitch to others everytime you give it. Stop and think, am I proud of how hard I am working more than I am tackling the right difficult problem?

It’s weird, is it actually lazier to work hard than find the right difficult problem? For instance, if I had an eating problem and I found myself rummaging through my fridge alot the lazy/hard way to solve it could be to put a lock around my fridge and the lock only opens if I ride my back for more then 3 hours. That’s alot of work and you “solved” the problem, but we know that that is a shit load of work and you didn’t really put any effort toward the actual problem. You simply solved all the points around it, but you worked so hard for it, right? Congrats you’re a hard working idiot. That is a red flag. The difficult thing here is you have an eating problem, go to a gym, go to a psychologist and find out why you find comfort in food, buy healthier foods, etc.

Another example is in politics and law. The ROI for “catching someone in a crime” is low. Someone has to wait around and catch you. The question is why are they breaking the law, why are they angry, is the law right, are the roads safe, etc? Way more difficult but when figured out MUCH easier to maintain and way less hard. Try building a fence on the border of Mexico and the U.S. That’s alot of dumb level hard work. I mean the most similar things are the ancient Great Wall of China, and the BerlinWall…..really? Why don’t you want immigrants here, why do they want to be here and find a mutually beneficial result? If they are coming to the U.S. for healthcare, in order to get healthcare you must be a citizen, in order to be a citizen, you must do x. If it’s cash then offer cash to register, as it may be cheaper then manning and building a non interest aligning wall. Aligning interest and solving difficult problems allows you to not need to over manage tasks and decreases hard work. The best system is one that manages itself to be accommodating to everyone’s passions, interest and goals as closely as possible so that the management of themselves is the most efficient way to work. Regulating pirating music is way harder then making it cheaper and easier for users to download individual songs almost instantly instead of having to break the law, code, search, and wait for songs that are stolen.

Hiring

For years employees would hire veterans because after x amount of years of experience an employer knew they were getting a knowledgeable person based on track record, but that is kind of a lazy way to hire. It’s just like football, you hire skill and lose potential, you pay to mitigate risk. Employers would then hire young people at a low salary if they were bright, once again to mitigate risk. “You seem smart but you don’t have a track record so we will have to pay you less.” Much like football you are not setting your team up to win a super bowl in the coming years. (This also sounds similar to VC world)

What FaceBook, Google, etc. well in addition to hiring smart veterans was they flipped the script a bit. They started hiring young people with alot of potential and paying them alot of money. A few years later they are winning super bowls. And the old employer style is having a hard time finding talent. Now everyone wants a young genius and they are in short supply.

Time and time again this risk mitigation strategy is a red flag and one should be sure they are mitigating for the right reasons. Also, when you save time by mitigating it is a red flag because in a way you are being lazy, and when you are lazy you give opportunity to those that aren’t lazy to move ahead. (not lazy cause you don’t work hard but lazy because you are using a system to think for you and when you do that you get further and further from being different and different equals success because not everyone can be successful).