Winning 101: Effective Entrepreneurship Demystified

Successful businesses are built on sensible decision-making regarding inputs, activities and outputs. Some priorities are higher than others and some uses of resources are wiser than others. The ability to pull everything together in the right way is what enables business leaders to create new categories or dominate existing ones. But doing all that doesn’t need to be as complicated as it seems.

At Applico, we work with companies, new and established, to help them make the most inspired and sound decisions possible and to deliver against their strategic plans. As a result, we’ve become quite adept at recognizing signals, even before they become material KPIs.

Universally speaking, the promise of future success is most evident when owners and operators play to their strengths, rather than chasing everything that could one-day be possible with the most dominant platform imaginable. Success begets success.

Avoiding “platform creep” in a business is akin to avoiding feature creep with a product. Here’s how to do it.

Provenance: what brought you here

Have you encountered, firsthand, the same challenge or adversity as your would-be users?
- Express that pain vividly and with conviction to address it.
- Arriving at a unique value proposition means being lucid, measurable and/or disruptive – not just “better” than the norm.
- Demonstrate operating experience that supports your ability to execute effectively.
Looking back over these time horizons: 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 50 years (and any other relevant periods), what patterns in technological and cultural events can you track?
- Those patterns are more than likely to repeat in the future, although, possibly, at more rapid intervals.
- Foresight methodologies can be used to predict recurrences of those macro trends in coming time horizons
- Managerial “Pathfinding” is the technique of studying comparable and successful case studies from the past to chart your course in go-to-market and platform-development strategy.

Market: what you’re trying to do

What is the basis for your assumptions about market size (in terms of users, frequency of transactions, value of transactions or ability to create a new category), need for a solution and persistence of the opportunity?
- Now, you can measure the power of your relationships and partnership opportunities.
- Confirm that you’ve positioned your business to capitalize on network effects.

Objective: stratifying the complexity of your contribution

Is your unique value proposition an enhancement (feature), solution (product) or an ecosystem (platform)?
- If you’re improving on an existing solution, consider how your feature fits into the ecosystem of commercially available products.
- If your product is better than others, understand how demonstrate engagement with the consumer market, based on the successes of comparable entities.
- If you’re changing the approach for more than one group of users, understand how to deliver value to both parties in such a way that overcomes the “chicken and egg” problem of gaining initial traction, through optimal value delivery to each user group.

Team: identifying your talents

Can you itemize the skills each of your team members possesses?
- Build on those skills, rather than trying to hire to fill every imaginable skill. This makes demonstrating wins more identifiable, and allows you to A/B test your intuition and tactics.
- Whether your technology team is initially internal or external, make sure you’re not building on a totally outdated stack. As long as your technology is reasonably contemporary, employ the developer kits you know and experiment with new technology incrementally. Don’t be tempted to adopt shiny new stuff across the board, as you’ll encounter compounding learning curves that interfere with your business objectives.
- “Build vs. Buy” decisions can be rendered as needed. No matter what anyone says, every company buys stuff. The trick is to buy stuff that can be evolved or substituted without requiring entirely new architecture or business planning.

Data: intellectual capital can be humble 1’s and 0’s

What story will you be telling with the usage data you collect?
- Don’t say, “big data.” That’s a term reserved for enterprise companies who have to make sense of unstructured messes of information to retroactively draw conclusions about trends.
- Instead, focus on utility and personalization. If you can track something specific to understand someone, a group, or the social graph better, than you can predictively alleviate pain.

Terms: frameworks for doing deals

Are you comfortable expressing your desired outcomes?
- Know what will move the needle for your company.
- Understand what commitments you can’t afford to make.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel with your deal structure: use battle-tested terms familiar to you and your partners.
- Realize that every successful negotiation enables further opportunity.

Money: actually, let’s interpret this one as liquidity

With a similar amount of deployable resources in the past, have you been able to deliver against the complexity of goals you are solving for now?
- If yes, then it’s less important that you have all the funds you need at the moment.
- If you are solid on all the categories above this one, be confident knowing VCs, angels, and ranking executives would much rather fund an authentic business person with a plan than someone chasing the opportunities others consider attractive.

Directly answering these questions will help you chart your business’s path to success and stay focused on your core mission.

If you think you have the ability to help Applico’s clients answer these questions on a daily basis, apply for the open Principal position in our Boston office. Applico helps its clients build platform business models to launch and deliver technology-driven operations at scale.

Filed under: Product Engineering | Topics: entrepreneurs, startup