Just saw Bart’s post on how funding can kill your startup and completely agree. Funding can be great for you and it’s certainly required at some points but I see startups all the time trying to solve problems in the wrong sequence.
One of the suggestions I have is to try and solve the problem your business will solve manually first, and then automate it. This is not always possible, but where it is, you can save significant amounts of money, equity and time.
What I mean is to do it by hand. Do it yourself. Use text files, free online forms, a blog, phone calls, door-to-door sales and whatever it takes to show that you can make a customer really happy and preferably get them to pay for it. Once you’ve done that, a few times, you are in a much better position to both build the technology and raise the funds if needed.
When you do it manually, like Bart said, you get creative and you use what’s at your disposal to get the job done. You can also much more easily change things on the fly.
- Sales pitch not working? – try another one.
- Target market not interested? – find another one.
- End product not packaged up nicely with a ribbon? – repackage.
- Price too low? – raise it up (yes, raise it up)
You’ll be more experienced in your new field both generally, and from a product and sales perspective. The product you build after you have done it manually will be much better than any product you could have brainstormed up before hand.
It’s rare that the technology is the hardest thing to solve. Don’t get me wrong, technology is hard, but it’s more likely to be an iterative, user experience issue not a ‘can we actually build this’ issue.
Build better. Do your startup manually first, then automate it.