We have various ways of thinking about success! basing on the culture, lifestyle, and the up bring of one. some just find themselves on the silver platter others have to mine the silver get it into manufacturing then later have the platter! it’s so funny life is never fair but its just.
Startups also have different ways of getting into success, some toil hard, they have to be the marketing team, developing team, human relations team , imagine that hustle bruh?! and some just from the idea pitch boom investor and growth! but do we really know what happens behind the scenes? do we know what it takes ? do we know the steps of climbing the ladder?
I believe that the startup organization is one of the greatest forms to make the world a better place. If you take a group of people with the right equity incentives and organize them in a startup, you can unlock human potential in a way never possible before . You get them to achieve unbelievable and unimaginable things. But if the startup organization is so great, why do so many fail? what is that that actually matters most for startup success.
First we call it the “IDEA“. Mahn! we name it all kind of things the million dollar idea, the future idea and all those fancy name, we tend to think that the “IDEA” is the major key . We even hide the “IDEA” from people so that they cant steal. Quoting Bill Gross, the founder of IdeaLab [quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]I named my company Idealab for how much I worship the “aha!” moment when you first come up with the idea. But then over time, I came to think that maybe the team, the execution, adaptability, that mattered even more than the idea.[/quotes]
“Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.” What happens when your idea ping backs with no success, you release a product on the market lets take and example of the new Pro Book, legit stuff big idea everybody anticipating for the machine was this is the ice breaker then boom!! one idea, effort on execution , they remove the USB ports, we use the damn! ports daily who has to get the dongles at a price again “I think that’s so true about business as well. So much about a team’s execution is its ability to adapt to getting punched in the face by the customer. The customer is the true reality. And that’s why I came to think that the team maybe was the most important thing.” every one criticized the machines, well its a big company but at least we’ve learnt customers matter over an idea, you don’t produce it for self.
So the “IDEA“, then the “TEAM“, then we come to the “BUSINESS MODEL“, the idea failed when you became selfish or probably your effort was less, so you brought help and formed a team, they also came and added ideas , and you are on the pool of thoughts which one should we execute? for they all sound nice. Then you come up with the “BUSINESS MODEL” so that you attack each and every end point of the market and situation in the right desired way so that you can achieve success faster.
Along the journey with the three keys you realize you’ve traveled a bigger mile and now there is a huge abyss standing in between you and success, the huge gap is money, we lack “FUNDING” , luckily we have crowdfunding and angel investors . so you do your thing so fast, take into consideration huge companies have fallen down they all have the cash, the team, the business model we copy from but! they’ve failed.
Then you exhaust all the options and some reality starts to hit you as an individual, or as a company. Maybe i released my product at the wrong time ,
Bill Gross quotes [quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]Is the idea way too early and the world’s not ready for it? Is it early, as in, you’re in advance and you have to educate the world? Is it just right? Or is it too late, and there’s already too many competitors?.
So I tried to look very carefully at these five factors across many companies. And I looked across all 100 Idealab companies, and 100 non-Idealab companies to try and come up with something scientific about it.
So first, on these Idealab companies, the top five companies — Citysearch, CarsDirect, GoTo, NetZero, Tickets.com — those all became billion-dollar successes. And the five companies on the bottom —Z.com, Insider Pages, MyLife, Desktop Factory, Peoplelink — we all had high hopes for, but didn’t succeed.
So I tried to rank across all of those attributes how I felt those companies scored on each of those dimensions. And then for non-Idealab companies, I looked at wild successes, like Airbnb and Instagram and Uber and Youtube and LinkedIn.
And some failures: Webvan, Kozmo, Pets.com Flooz and Friendster. The bottom companies had intense funding, they even had business models in some cases, but they didn’t succeed. I tried to look at what factors actually accounted the most for success and failure across all of these companies, and the results really surprised me.
The number one thing was timing. Timing accounted for 42 percent of the difference between success and failure. Team and execution came in second, and the idea, the differentiability of the idea, the uniqueness of the idea, that actually came in third.
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[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]
So now let me give you some specific examples about each of these. So take a wild success like Airbnb that everybody knows about. Well, that company was famously passed on by many smart investors because people thought, “No one’s going to rent out a space in their home to a stranger.” Of course, people proved that wrong. But one of the reasons it succeeded, aside from a good business model, a good idea, great execution, is the timing.
That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed extra money,and that maybe helped people overcome their objection to renting out their own home to a stranger.
Same thing with Uber. Uber came out, incredible company, incredible business model, great execution, too. But the timing was so perfect for their need to get drivers into the system. Drivers were looking for extra money; it was very, very important.
Some of our early successes, Citysearch, came out when people needed web pages. GoTo.com, which we announced actually at TED in 1998, was when companies were looking for cost-effective ways to get traffic. We thought the idea was so great, but actually, the timing was probably maybe more important.And then some of our failures. We started a company called Z.com, it was an online entertainment company. We were so excited about it — we raised enough money, we had a great business model, we even signed incredibly great Hollywood talent to join the company. But broadband penetration was too low in 1999-2000. It was too hard to watch video content online, you had to put codecs in your browser and do all this stuff, and the company eventually went out of business in 2003.
Just two years later, when the codec problem was solved by Adobe Flash and when broadband penetration crossed 50 percent in America, YouTube was perfectly timed. Great idea, but unbelievable timing. In fact, YouTube didn’t even have a business model when it first started. It wasn’t even certain that that would work out. But that was beautifully, beautifully timed.
[/quotes] says Bill Gross on his TED talk 2015
in summary, is execution definitely matters a lot. The idea matters a lot. But “TIMING” might matter even more. And the best way to really assess timing is to really look at whether consumers are really ready for what you have to offer them. And to be really, really honest about it, not be in denial about any results that you see, because if you have something you love, you want to push it forward, but you have to be very, very honest about that factor on timing.
