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By PASCAL FINETTE

The Heretic is a free dispatch delivering insights into what it takes to lead into & in the unknown. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated.

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Apr 4th, 2013 Share: Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn

Sequencing

You wouldn’t try to bake a cake by throwing the ingredients into the oven before you have mixed them together. There is a clear sequence to the way you prepare a dish.

The same is true for startups — things often have to happen in a sequence to make sense.

Let me give you an example: I recently spoke to an entrepreneur who wanted to raise money with the aim to attend conferences, create a PR blitz and do advertising for his product. Yet the product isn’t nearly close to being ready for prime-time. He would be much better off taking the money and pouring it into his product first, foster relationships with the crucial group of early customers, collect feedback, refine the product until he feels he has great product-market fit and then go out and market the hell out of it.

A bunch of startups screw their sequencing up: They switch on the marketing engine to early, they give partners access to a half-baked API, they bring their product into new markets before they have fully figured out what the product needs to have to attract customers.

Think about your sequence, map it out in your roadmap and work hard on the pieces which are right in front of you — not the ones which you might have to hit way later down the road.

Focus on the next step and make the main thing the main thing.

Just as in baking.


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