go big or go home

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infrastructure. Go BIG companies are literally
compressing the amount of time it takes to build their
companies.
Getting a company into market quickly is just the
beginning though. Once you re actually in market
you need to grow as fast as humanly possible just to
keep ahead of everyone else. Go BIG companies don t
just grow over time; they learn to scale exponentially.
They go from tiny little ideas to major industry
powerhouses in a matter of years.
In this section we are going to dig into the challenges
that startups face from the moment they conceive an
idea until well after they ve arrived in the market. We
are then going to take a look at what you can do to get
your own idea to market quickly and how to scale
your business to grow as fast as humanly possible.
92 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
VideoBlog: our guinea pig
To illustrate the points in this section we re going to
take a sample company concept and point out how we
can strip it down to the bare essentials to get the
company to market as fast as possible and keep it as
lean as possible. Then we are going to figure out how
to grow it up as fast as possible. It s all about speed
and scale.
Our guinea pig sample company will be VideoBlog, a
new service that will allow amateur videographers to
upload short video vignettes to our server and allow
others to view them. It s like the wildly popular
Internet blogging services, but with video on the pages
instead of text. We ll make money by charging our
content producers to host their videos on our site,
providing both a place to upload their videos as well as
an audience to view them.
VideoBlog may or may not be a successful company in
the end, but what we will focus on in this section is how
fast we can get the company to market and how quickly
we can scale them to be a big company.
So strap on a helmet, it s time to Go BIG!
GROWTH 93
Chapter 5
Build Backwards
Let me start by showing you the beauty of doing it
backwards. No, this isn't the prologue to the Kama
Sutra, although we are talking about getting things done
from a different angle. It s often helpful to conceive
and build your business backwards envisioning where
we want to be in the future and then figuring out how to
get there faster.
Starting with the end in mind encourages focus on what
we are setting out to accomplish. This in turn makes it
easier to eliminate any tasks that won t bring us closer
to our goal. Organic growth is interesting, but it s
fundamentally unfocused. Chasing random
opportunities and figuring it all out as you go can be
disastrously slow.
If we plan on getting through our timelines faster we
have to be able to understand exactly what those
94 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
timelines are. Our first exercise will be to lay out
exactly what our business would look like over a
specific period of time. Once we identify critical
milestones, then we can turn our attention toward
achieving them faster to compress our timelines.
GROWTH 95
Define Success
Building the company backwards starts with defining
exactly what you are setting out to create. You
wouldn't build your dream home without some idea of
what the finished product would look like and an
undertaking as complex as a startup is no different.
We want to make our definition of success as specific
as possible, so we know where the finish line is. This
definition of success isn t necessarily the finish line.
You aren t going to pack up and go home after you
reach it. Rather, it s a point where you believe your
business will have achieved a significant goal picked
for the express purpose of figuring out how to reach it
quickly.
Admittedly, picking this point is more art than science.
You want to pick something far enough out that you
aren t going through this process every week and
something close enough so you can stay in touch with
changes in the market.
96 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
Here are some important elements of your finish line.
Be specific. The more detail you provide about your
goal the better. Instead of saying we want to be the
leader try to say explain what that position would
require you to have achieved (more customers, more
visitors, etc).
Be realistic. We all want to Go BIG, but deciding that
you want to be the only line of clothing that anyone will
ever wear is pretty ridiculous. Look for a goal that you
could logically see happening.
Be near term. What you set out to be in the short term
and what you evolve to in the longer term could be
different. Today you could be the best operating
system for personal computers. In the future you might
evolve to becoming the world s largest software
company. One step at a time.
For the purposes of VideoBlog, we re going to say that
we are trying to become the most heavily-trafficked
video blogging service with more uploaded videos and
a broader selection of content than any other hosted
video blogging service.
Notice that we didn t say we want to be the biggest
blog service. That would be a little too broad it
would imply that we want to be number one at text
blogging, audio blogging, etc. We focused on one
particular market (video blogging) and one particular
goal with quantifiable metrics number of visitors and
number of videos.
GROWTH 97
We also picked a goal that we could reasonably achieve
in the next three to five years. Once we got that big,
could we evolve to become the next MTV network?
Sure, but let s worry about that when we get there. For
the time being creating the largest video blogging
service would be a nice finish line for us.
At this point we still don t know how long it will take
to get to our goal, but we at least know what our goal is.
Figuring out the timeline is our next step.
Recommendations:
" Pick a goal that your company is setting out to
achieve overall. Make it well-defined and
quantifiable so you know whether or not you re
getting close. Open-ended and amorphous goals
won t let you know whether you are getting closer
to achieving them any faster.
" Think about this goal like you would think about
finding a point on a map. Once you know
specifically where you re trying to go, finding the
shortest path is a lot easier.
98 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
Set your Milestones
Now that we know where we are trying to go, let s
figure out how long it will take to get there. The
critical milestones for a startup company revolve
around getting to market quickly and proving yourself
once you re in the market. That s what we re going to
focus on here.
I m not going to suggest that I know exactly what your
milestones are but if you re like most startups, they
probably look something like this:
1. Get to market. Get our product developed and
make it available to consumers as quickly as
possible. This might include just getting the
VideoBlog website up and running and giving
people access to our core product.
2. Get to a break-even. Once the product is up
and running our next goal would be to get the
company to a break-even point on expenses.
This would put our focus solely on earning cash
to keep from going out of business. This might
take months. It might take years. But until we
get to this point we ll have a hard time staying
in business, which is a pretty important goal.
GROWTH 99
3. Get majority market share. This may or may
not precede #2. Sometimes a company needs to
get majority market share in order to generate
enough revenues to become profitable or break
even. Regardless, in our business we are going
to focus on fiscal issues before trying to drive [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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