I
wondered, if you have two start-ups, building the same product, which one would
you rate as more promising. What criteria would you use to separate them?
My
thoughts are on founder's knowledge to build a product from scratch by itself.
I
used to see start-up being very promising, with great idea, founder was high caliber
manager and sales person, starting funding was good, and which failed after a
five years. Business
started well, capital was raised very fast, revenue grew rapidly, clients were
interested to come, new product prototypes were often presented.
Profit
was not seemed to be important in these early days.
And
then came the days after the early days, prototypes were great, but customers
expected to see, as promised, more quality and more features. There were no
responses from the start-up.
Employees
at start-up tried, but faced with problems in execution and didn't succeed, so
asked for helping hand, but leader who started the wheels, wasn't the tech guy,
who can build the product. He knew all around the product: its future
functionalities and capabilities, but not in technical detail how to build it
to become so featured and enhanced.
Start-up
is all about the product.
In
very early days of start-up, person with the highest level of energy,
motivation, failure and stress resistance is the founder, and it could not be
expected from employee to have such capabilities and solve the hardest
problems, the founder is the one.
If
founder lack knowledge on how to build a product from scratch, the start-up is
weak, and rate of failure is for sure higher.
To
conclude, being founder, manager or sales person in early start-up is not
enough, the one should know how to build a product, and then he might succeed.