Here are five genius pieces of advice for start-up entrepreneurs. In short: focus, hire passion, it’s a marathon, beware of investors, product perfection.
This advice comes from Jonathan Abrams, founder and CEO of Socializr. I first read this advice on the blog of Jason Goldberg founder of Social|Median.
Focus is difficult but crucial. Until your product is complete, your technology solid, your customers or users happy, and your sales or traffic growing and near critical mass, most other things do not matter. A startup CEO can waste a lot of time on premature marketing, business development, partnerships, PR, consultants, board maintenance, etc. before the company is really ready for those things.
Hire based on passion, not resumes. If you attract candidates based on your prestigious investors, be wary. If you lose candidates because you don’t have prestigious investors, they weren’t the people who you needed anyways.
A startup can get more done in the same amount of time than a large company, and needs to, but a startup is still more like a marathon than a sprint. Things will still take longer than you expect to get done, and you will make mistakes. Making mistakes is ok, as long as you get more things right than wrong each week, and correct the things you get wrong. Avoid irreversible mistakes.
Losing control of a startup to investors puts founders and common shareholders in a vulnerable position and may not improve the company’s execution or increase the company’s chances of success. Surrendering the corporate governance of a company to the wrong people is typically an irreversible mistake.
For a software or Internet company, overall execution depends on engineering execution in the first few years — make sure your stuff works! A technical founder should stay involved in the technology until it does.
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