Startup Stages: Survive, Explore, Focus, Refine, Grow

SKMurphy’s Startup Stages: Idea, Open for Business, Early Customers, Finding Your Niche, and Scaling Up also map to Survive, Explore, Focus, Refine, and Grow.

Startup Stages: Survive, Explore, Focus, Refine, Grow

Survive first. Explore second. Build third.

1. Survive: It’s good to fail small and fail fast. But also make sure to survive the failure. It’s no good to fail if you can’t get up again.
2. Explore: True exploration feels like zero progress. Everyone around you will tell you to focus. To stop messing around. To get on with it. The problem is, you need to find it first. This takes time and mistakes. In theory, this is all about fail fast, fail small. In reality, this is slow and painful.
3. Build: Find a great solution to a small pain point. Then use that to grow bigger.

Tyler Michalski in “The Basic Basics“

This reminds me of Rob Saric’s “Solvency First, Consistency Second, Growth Third”

“2. Solvency First, Consistency Second, Growth Third
If you don’t have enough money to survive you die. […] focus on ‘Minimum Viable Cash flow (MVC)’. Once you determine what the MVC is for both you and your team, work towards achieving that by whatever means you can. Consistency allows for predictability and the more predictable your business (‘X inputs results in Y outputs’) the faster you’ll grow.
Rob Saric in “Startups Are Hard“

I think they are both right, I have tried to put integrate these two insights into our startup stages mode:

1. Survive / Stay Solvent: This can involve the work/work balance of services and product development, the important thing is to generate enough cash flow to give your team the time to explore the market to find the right opportunity. This spans the “open for business” and “early customers” stages.
2. Explore: I think you are looking for a fit with your talents, interest, and experience. Any opportunity has to pass the “why you, why now?” test. What is it that your team brings to the problem that will allow you to differentiate your offering? The fastest iteration cycle is to build as little as possible and simply measure (observe) and learn. Always start from measurement and observation so that you understand the problem and the customer before you worry about your solution. This also involves asking the right questions, talking with many people, and taking time to integrate all that you have learned. This spans the “idea and team formation” and early customer stages.
3. Focus:  This is the first part of the “finding your niche” stage; selecting a candidate niche to focus on.
4. Refine (Make Consistent and Predictable):  This is the critical step in finding your niche that allows you to leave exploration mode, or at least substantially reduce your exploration efforts. You have enough knowledge of your teams capabilities to build predictable processes and of the customer’s needs to predict their reactions and identify prospects you should focus sales efforts on early in the engagement process.
5. Grow: now you enter the scaling up stage because you have useful diagnostics and predictable processes.

Distilling Rules of Thumb From Entrepreneurial Experience

Here are some additional blog posts on distilling rules of thumb from entrepreneurial experience:

• Six From Buster Benson’s “A Few Rules That I Try To Live By”
• Tony Schwartz’s Principles For Fiercely Complex Times
• You are a Doctor Not a Salesperson
• Bob “GoDaddy” Parson’s Rules for Business Success

More From Rob Saric

More from Rob Saric’s (@RobSaric) blog, his core beliefs linked to relevant articles on his site:

• Do great things even with smallest opportunities
• Never take anything for granted
• Surround yourself with genuinely good people
• Help others succeed (success does reciprocate)
• Build businesses that make meaning
• Relationship building and networking never ends
• Never ever quit! Persevere. If failure is imminent, don’t lose slowly