The real startup advantage
Latency and not velocity is the real startup advantage. Understand what I mean by this from the real-world example.
I observed a common pattern whenever I talked to any early-stage startup founders. They all worry about the large corporate competition taking over the market. We have all heard someone say on stage, at least once in a networking event, "If you are a startup, You have an advantage of speed, and you can move faster than your competition."
There are two conflicting things here.
I firmly believe startups don't move faster than big companies. These big companies have 1000s of people, Millions of $$$ to spend on any particular idea, existing market and potential to partner or acquire faster than we act. So they can move really fast, and they have velocity advantages.
Where startups move faster than big companies is in latency. Startups can go from idea to testing really fast in days/weeks. At a large company with abundant resources, it can take 6 months to go through the process to decide if they can follow the hunch of this new idea. In total, it can take a year or two to launch the product.
So latency and not velocity is the superpower of a fledgling startup. And if a startup can speed up the learning loop by decreasing the latency between having the idea to validate the idea by talking to the user. Startups can increase the odds of success significantly.
So the first thing to understand here is to not spend too much time on the building, keep it MVP, ship faster, reduce latency and talk to the customers as often as possible.
So the first thing to understand here is to not spend too much time on the building, keep it MVP, ship faster, reduce latency and talk to the customers as often as possible.
This particular framework has helped me a lot personally in making any decisions at the earliest stage. I call it a quick decision template. With this, I would ask myself and core team members three questions.
Will this impact core users? (Y/N)
Can we build the feature in < 1 week? (Y/N)
Is it reversible? (Y/N)
If all three have yes, you should immediately do it as soon as possible. If any of these three says no, you will need a deeper analysis to evaluate and reprioritise.
When Slack launched in 2013, Microsoft dominated enterprise communications. When Zoom launched, Skype & Google Meet were leaders in the video call space. But if you see now, these once-smaller companies are creating a new category. And this is all because of latency and not velocity.
And this is the beauty of an early stage where you can be nimble and build latency. Also, as an early-stage startup and due to a lean structure, you are always in a unique position for strong customer relationships. Your smaller size and leaner operations enable you to connect directly and more personally with customers than larger corporations.
With stronger customer connections, you can build a solid community of power users to increase loyalty and advocacy. This takes time at larger corporations, yet the connection is not as strong as in startups due to the lean operating structure.
And because there is loyalty and close connection with customers, your feedback loop is very tight and authentic, which leads to better products. Eventually, with this path ahead, you beat the large corporation competition.
The formula seems simple, but as an early-stage founder, you will have to pay attention to minute details that improve the connection, feedback loop and customer support so your customer feels heard.
Hope you achieve what you aim to achieve. Go for it. I'm rooting for you. If you need any help, feel free to DM me, and I'm up for a quick virtual coffee chat. All the best.