JT Marino and Daehee Park are the founders of Tuft & Needle, a startup ecommerce mattress cutting gimmicks industry and margins.
As a start-up, every day is a battle against empty-sense distractions or nice to have customers ideas, team members and advisors who can throw you off course.
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Even more valuable than cash is the weather. Distract you can condemn your startup to mediocrity or stall it MidAir your competitors sail right by you.
Time is precious
At first it is important to identify the problem and build as quickly as possible solution. It is natural to focus because you only have a small amount of the track, you just quit your job with personal savings or you have raised a seed round of financing. Because of this, you are in time box and you have to hustle to build your product or service quickly to see a sign of strength.
Once you have found some traction and a product that resonates with customers, now is when you should double down and start building an exceptional product. At this point, you now have more activities than just the product to worry. You must run the business day to day and build a team while differentiating your brand and producing a product love people.
Accept that you can not do everything
As difficult as it is to remember that you can not fix everything, you must learn to say no. For example, when your customers ask other products, you know, these offers are sought and they will sell. But just because you can do it, does not mean you should.
If you pursue these paths, it will distract potential energy to make your core great and instead lead to just good enough .
If you view the emphasis over time, you will realize how powerful it can be.
Here's a quick mathematical exercise. If you focus on one product for only 30 minutes a day, which is only about 14 days in a year that you are focusing on your product. But if you were to focus on a single product for 3 hours per day, it is almost 86 days a year.
Imagine the difference in quality and reflection of a product that you could build in that time frame. Now consider reducing this level of concentration to a team of 10 people. Here's a little more than two full years of non-stop focused time that can be channeled into the construction of something extraordinary.
Focusing improves your core values
Other than just building a great product, the focus aid to communicate the purpose of your product in the world. It helps in understanding your customers what you do and how it compares.
In the case of physical products, it removes the complexity of choices so it's easier to make a buying decision. In the case of software products, it prevents bloating in the user interface, making it more pleasant to use.
Once you are on the right way to focus and reduce tirelessly scope, it then releases the time so you can continue to execute on building an exceptional experience. The support members include service level differentiators such as customer support, delivery and packing.
Once our product reaches the traction in the early days at Tuft & Needle, we were immediately presented with the challenge of retaining us to free other offers. This was particularly true in an industry where competitors usually have more than a dozen models to choose from. If we wanted to differentiate ourselves, we had to make our delicious low product to the point.
Because we had a product, it gave us time to have conversations with customers and gather feedback to continue to iterate and make it better. If we had additional products to support, we would not be able to do it as quickly or not at all.
Emphasis has also provided us the time to develop a lean and stable supply chain that could evolve with sales growth. We had more time to hire and interview people, and to develop methods to deliver services with everything that supports the product.
Simplify your mission
By focusing as a basic principle, we wonder Weekly: Can we reduce our reach? Can we focus on less? For projects that we take on, they are consistent with our mission and goals? Are our customers think there are too many choices?
Having a mission statement can be really helpful to guide the answers to these questions. It is a useful tool for the construction of autonomy in the development of the team. If the mission is clear, then the company's projects are self regulating. the team members may question themselves.
Differentiate your startup because the odds are already stacked against you. Do not spread yourself thin by building too many products or too many features. Stay focused and unique.