What We Are Doing
This post has been gestating in various forms over the past few weeks, so I feel its best just to post what we have. Short version: the last month and a bit has been a great experience.
We've left an over-expensive office, signed up for our own (much cheaper) space and meanwhile been squatting on the good graces (and in the windowless basement) of the Entrepreneurship Institute of SMU. Simply "four dudes and a desk", as Kent put it. Perhaps we should get tattoos.
We've spoken to quite a few people about our company and what we're hoping to achieve, and it's finally coalescing into something we can share. Our plan is less a traditional startup and more a philosophy; but less pompous than that sounds.
In simple terms we're going to take our pretty damn awesome small team and ship something new every 6-8 weeks: an incubator for ourselves. We're primarily working in mobile and web for consumers, but we certainly wouldn't rule out a business-to-business enterprise.
We're putting trust in ourselves to ship a variety of high quality, focussed products each with an ability to make money and turn into a business of it's own. We're not wedded to any business model and will derive cash from each product on it's own merits, some likely advertising-based, some licensing and some with direct payment (yay!) from users. What we're not doing, is looking at growth for any of our products with no revenue plan.
Now obviously this sounds like we're a bit flighty; how can we be 'focussed' on multiple products, shouldn't we pick one thing to focus on and 'pivot' (ugh) until we find our market. We don't disagree that this might be a valid plan for some but not for us, we really are 'investing in the team' to borrow another phrase often heard in startup circles. Plus we're human and humans can multi-task. Sometimes giving a product some breathing room in it's early stages, and putting it in the passive thinking part of your brain, can be a good thing.
A longer truth (not always told amongst the 'science' of startups) is that no-one really knows what will be successful and we're brave enough to admit that up front. We can guess, but it's more honest to say you don't know what features or products will chime with users. What's the magic ingredient of Instagram that led them to their incredible growth? I would venture that however much you analyze the it amongst many iPhone photo apps it might simply be timing, some luck and a simple and solid enough product. Who knows?
What we're looking for is to have a measurable impact on the world, be it from large numbers of users or recurring revenue, by driving our success from high-quality stuff that people want. We don't have a huge amount of money, but thanks to our investor, we do have some runway to allow ourselves to concentrate fully on building our own things without having to worry about food or a roof over our heads, meaning a requirement for consulting gigs. A luxury Arun & I did not have last year.
An interesting side-note to our approach is the news that this sort of thing seems to be coming into style...
Posted
by Andy Croll
