In The Weeds

Apr 29

Building Your Startup One Task at a Time

Our feline-in-residence, finding his next target in the jungle that is our weeded landscape.

Dear Diary,

Spring is here and with that came the overgrown weed garden that is my home’s landscape design. On every corner of our property lies a new kind of weed to be pulled. Some are stubborn, some are simple, and a few are near impossible without extra support. And as I step outside each day looking into the yard, part of me wonders how this will ever get better when it’s not only everywhere, but it grows back so fast that it seems we’ll never finish. I know it’s possible because there are many other places around me that don’t have this weed problem like I do, but figuring out a way to do this that empowers me to keep weeding is the answer to the million dollar question.

Today, I decided that instead of doing nothing, I was going to do something. So I laced up my shoes, put on my gloves, and started picking everything I saw as I walked outside my door. As I started pulling these weeds out one by one, each with their own challenges, I realized this is exactly like building a startup from the very beginning.

Originally, when I thought about starting my own company, I always visualized it being an infinitely large multi-dimensional space that you could put anything you want into. You could build whatever pillars you wanted, whatever stepping stones you needed, and bring in people to help you build and grow. But as I’ve learned more about what it means to build a startup, I’ve learned that it really comes down to a series of tasks that need to be accomplished (at least in the beginning stages). You are building your own business, but when you need to get other individuals involved, you need to have some basic information figured out. Things like:

Market Demand
How you plan on selling your product or service
What you’re trying to do and how you stand out
How you plan to grow and scale
And more

As I’ve been learning over the last few weeks, this information is really discovered through a series of predetermined exercises and tasks. The more you do, the closer you get to the clearer picture. So like picking a weed out of an overgrown garden, each task you complete gets you one step closer to your vision. But this analogy goes even further. What about when we start thinking about bringing people in the loop? Let’s think about scope, landscape, investments, and more.

Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with my mentor from the RAIN Tech Accelerator and talk a little about what it means to start small and where the checkpoints are for investors, partners, and more. In a way, everything is up to you and no two paths are the same. However, just like picking weeds, it’s all about what approach you take that works for you.

Before entering that conversation, I imagined starting small with a build-first mindset. When thinking about what we want to sell as a business and how we want to rethink the status quo, I always imagined it by the technology we are innovating. Scoping as small as possible, our plan was to build our minimum viable product (MVP) that we could continue to iterate on and scale in years to come. In parallel, we would work on the business side of the project, running customer interviews, developing product strategy, and more. This way, when it came time to ask for funding, we would have eliminated as much technical risk as possible while proving our market, giving aligned investors no reason to say no. However, there’s two major flaws with this method:

💵 We have limited capital.
🤔 We are assuming the product we are building is the right solution for the pain point.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

💵Limited Capital: When building a startup that has not received much outside funding, you are doing a lot of your work with sweat equity, otherwise known as free labor in hopes of raising the value of what you are working on. The limited capital you have needs to go toward the goods or services you need to grow your company that can’t be done with sweat equity. This could be material costs, advertising costs, contract work, or otherwise.

Now compare this to a large company investing in innovation (like OpenAI, Intel, Google, Amazon, or others). Often, there are opportunities for employees at these companies to incubate and innovate their ideas, whether it’s something for the team they are on or it’s their own idea they work on through some kind of incubator program. These larger companies operate with massive amounts of capital, often setting millions aside for innovation work to push the boundaries of what they are doing today. Thus, employees are encouraged to build out what they are trying to innovate to a point where it is easily scalable and releasable. They get justification, receive permission, polish, and release. While often teams are operating within budgetary constraints from the company, there is a greater incentive to build your MVP in a way that could be released on its own but also scale and grow in future iterations after it proves its worth.

In a small company, you can’t do this as easily. Larger companies can get away with this because they have revenue coming in already. They often use this as a way to enhance an already existing product or introduce something new to incentivize customers to buy the new technology. In a small company, you don’t yet have brand recognition, a large-scale product, or much incoming revenue to offset cost. This means, you need to reprioritize your efforts to build that following.

🤔Assumed Solution: This leads right into assuming that the product being built is the right solution for the pain point. In a large company, sometimes you are given the problem to solve, so you can assume that the solution you come up with to best solve that problem is valid. However, sometimes you are innovating and vouching for yourself. Given this larger company is often already in the space (and employees work in that space as well), it can be easier to justify the problem/solution pair and feel relatively safe, even with the risk of it not working out. With a small company, the capital you have is the capital you have. Thus, you need to find ways to minimize risk.

Let’s take the case of someone starting a business in the industry they have been working in for years. They may feel fairly confident in understanding the pain points suffered by themselves and their colleagues and know the market exists for what they want to build. In their mind, there is less risk for them to just start building and do the verification work along the way to decrease the amount of time it takes to get their MVP up. But what happens if their viewpoint doesn’t accurately reflect the viewpoint of the majority? Or what if it misses on a critical minority? By focusing on building out the solution first alongside justification, they run the risk of wasting capital and sweat equity to build something when they may need to pivot. If they instead spent the time to validate their assumptions before building, they could pivot before putting in the excess work to build something that won’t be as successful as they assumed.

In the case of someone who is starting a business not in the industry they have worked in for years, this assumption becomes even greater. While building the MVP is important, especially in a tech startup, market validation and customer insight are essential before getting too far in the development process.

Now, some folks find themselves with the chicken and the egg problem. In order to get true customer feedback on an idea, sometimes an MVP needs to be built. 🐔But how do you make sure you aren’t investing too much time into an MVP before validating your market and getting customer feedback? 🥚

This requires the mindset shift. 🧐

What if instead of focusing on building out the MVP you have in your head, you take a step back and focus on building out an MVP that will showcase your solution without having your solution built out? If you can show just a glimpse of how you may solve the problem and get people excited, interested, and invested, they will continue to follow you on your journey, cheering you on from the sidelines until they can get their hands on your product you’re bringing to the world. In this case, it’s a win win. You don’t have to do so much early on and you get people interested and excited in the vision you’re out to realize. 🥇

Lead. Inspire. Grow.

Let’s jump back to weeding in the garden. 🌱 Like I mentioned before, this seemed like such a daunting task, and solutions were everywhere. However, nothing seemed to really resonate with me in a way that made me say “yes, let’s just do that” and get the entire household on board. Talking it through trying to convince my partner we should even work on this never got much of anywhere, and it was because I was trying to use a solution that just didn’t fit “the market need” (in this case, our need). It never beats the alternative of just leaving them alone because we have such limited bandwidth (and not many plants the weeds would compete with resources for).

But one day, I decided instead to just choose a direction and start. I chose the solution that worked with my skill set and only used the things we already owned. If it failed, I could stop anytime. But if it succeeded, we would be on track to figuring out how to handle this. The method:

🌱 Picking weeds by hand. One by one. 🌱

For me, it’s a pretty big deal to do this. As someone who has bad wrists from my early years as a percussionist, I knew my time and impact would be limited. Each weed I picked would be one less weed I could pick during the day. However, I picked an area that would be high impact (something we see walking out of our house) and started chipping away at it. One by one, the area became cleaner. Almost done with one section, but running out of bandwidth to finish, my partner comes out and sees the impact of the progress I’ve made. Suddenly, he understands why this is important and is inspired to start picking weeds himself. With that extra investment of time, energy, and resources, we were able to complete the area (and then some). At the end, we looked back on every single weed we picked that day and relished in our accomplishment, noting the significant difference it made. After that point, we worked together to come up with a plan to tackle the next section, growing our operations with some capital, time, and resources. And the more we did this, the more others began to notice.

This is how growth happens. It starts with an idea and a little inspiration. And with each weed you pick, you show the world why it matters and how it can be done. And through doing, you inspire others to be a part of your vision. And when you have others on board, you have the opportunity to expand your resources, your capital, your growth, and, most importantly, your vision. It takes a village to build a startup, but you can’t start until you start pulling the weeds yourself. So how much money, time, and resources are you going to spend before you start pulling up the weeds in your startup garden?