“Looking good, Full ahead”… “Aye aye, Captain”

A few years back I was in a comfy board room two years into yet another distrupting startup. In those two, short years our traffic had grown, our sign-ups had grown, we all congratulated ourselves on a job well done.

It was coming to the end of our growth phase and time for the next round of investment which meant we needed a credible monetisation plan. But all we had were these high level numbers and no idea who our users really were, what they wanted from us, what they liked or disliked about our service. They were just out there much like a submarine captain running silent knows there’s water out there but that’s about all.

Most startups begin to lose their way about 18 months to 2 years into their journey. Often that’s just around the time when they’re lookng for the next round of investment.

By then the Founder has mostly built whatever vision that he/she set out to build and the nett result of this time is:

  • All of the obvious things have been done - it’s no longer obvious what to do next.
  • Time & money are running out.
  • The business has acquired a circle of early adopters willing to “give it a go” but they’re the curious types equally quick to give other things ago instead.
  • The business needs a credible model reach beyond these early adopters and out to the rest of us but that means finding out who we are & what we want.

And the known

It would be wrong to say “Data is the answer” because graphs on their own are just pictures but a startup that wants to prove to the world it has a viable business model needs to stop having opinions, start having a lot more facts and people able to take a cold, hard look at those facts.

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