The first question of a new company should be……….
Some say start small. Others say ‘what is your purpose on earth?’ And the gap between the two is your job as an entrepreneur.
More correctly, it’s not choosing a single spot between the two, it’s spending your whole life swinging from one to the other.
Too much vision and you don’t get anything done. You do big business plans. Big dreaming. Analyse how huge you could be. But you never start. You never get to one customer. Our goal at Zapr (7 years ago) was to build a utility for 100 million customers. The CEO was obsessed and it really got us excited and drove us. But we didn’t have enough comfort with the pathway from 1 happy customer upwards.
Too much focus and you never go anywhere worthwhile. This is an interesting one. Is a very simple iphone app that does one thing and gets 99c from 1 million people not a good business? It might be hugely profitable. OzWeather app was this for us. Fast to get up. Hugely profitable. But it’s been hard to take it anywhere much bigger.
It’s not one or the other, it’s both at various times. My view is that you need hourly focus and monthly vision in a new company.
To finish, here is Jack Welch talking about focusing on vision.