I hear lots of startup founders get worried when I talk about testing things fast, moving quickly, trying different target micro-segments and failing constantly on the way to finding a working model.
“Yeah, but won’t we be burning people? Won’t they not come back ever again? Won’t it hurt our brand?”
A brand, as I understand it, is the sum total of your reputation. Brutally, to begin with, you don’t have one. Yes, if you try something with an early potential customer and it sucks, then they may think that startuperer.com is no good, but before they got there, they had no idea who you were, so you really haven’t gone backwards.
Though that’s only mildly important.
The most important thing is that if you are already trying to protect your brand, you’ll will find it impossible to get to a point where it’s all working. You’ll be so busy worrying about disappointing people that you will only play in safe areas, and safe ain’t going to get you ‘there’. You need to have the guts to try, fail, annoy a bunch of people on the road to success. I promise that they will forgive you later.
The other bad part of this is middle-of-the-roading. If you’re trying not to annoy people, then you are absolutely aiming too broadly. You should not just be annoying people, you should be flatly rejecting them. Change your domain name to;
www.i-only-want-these-types-of-people-and-everyone-else-can-get-lost.com
To reiterate – you will disappoint and frustrate a bunch of customers on your way to success.
Face it, get over it and get on with it.
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