Stay Simple – My Most Valuable Business Lesson

Creating a startup company with very little experience is a tough challenge. You’re bound to make small mistakes, screw some big things up, and buy cheap viagra soft

When my partner & I created StatFuse, it was only our second venture ever. Not only that, but it was our first web application and we didn’t have much guidance.

The whole episode taught me a very valuable lesson that I want to share with all of you today. We couldn’t keep the project, website, and vision simple. We wanted to do too much and didn’t really know what our own vision was.

The Problem

With StatFuse, we wanted to help students in every aspect of the college admissions process. While that was a very inspirational dream to have, it really wasn’t possible.

Why? Because we couldn’t do all this before launching. Not only that, but we couldn’t explain to others what our vision really was without taking up half their day.

When launching, we had a bunch of different things our website did, but we as the visionaries didn’t really know what our goal was. That was a pretty scary moment.

Businesses want to come out of the gates doing as much as possible. However, that’s the wrong thing to do. It only takes one great product, service, or piece of information to win your customers over.

The Lesson

This taught me a few things about creating a startup. Before you even start working on it, you need to have a distinct vision and goal you want to achieve.

Once you have a goal, build around that goal and do not change that goal unless it is absolutely necessary. Not only that, but instead of finding thousands of ways to fulfill the goal, find the best one.

Create one simple strategy and approach to achieve your goals before launching your business. Simplicity shouldn’t just be in the approach, but also in the overall execution of the project.

You want to find the simplest way to explain, market, and sell your product to customers. Take a look at DropBox.

DropBox is one of the most successful online applications out there. What do they do? They store your files on a cloud server making it easy for you to view them from different computers.

That’s it. DropBox’s vision is to actually simplify your lives. Did they achieve that? Yes, now you do not need flash drives, CD’s, or even a laptop to carry files from place A to place B.

Think simple, clean, and smooth. You do not need to change the world from day 1, you just need to make a dent in it. Simplicity sells and I learned that the hard way.

The Advantages

When you stay simple, your sales pitches are shorter, your customers are more engaged, and getting your vision across is much easier. Not only that, but you get to focus more on sales/marketing and less on maintaining your products.

When your business takes off, you start to create a community and generate awareness for your brand, which now allows you to expand your vision further. Companies like SalesForce, HubSpot, and others came into the market with just one goal.

Their first goal worked and that’s when they decided to expand and create new products. They could now charge a premium for these products (which they couldn’t have done had they launched all this together) and they had a base of satisfied customers.

Simplicity also makes it easy for you to tweak and change your product/business/service as necessary. You can never know for sure whether your ideas will be successful. Instead of building the worlds greatest ‘prototype’, build something simple and get feedback before going any further.

Conclusion

It is very easy to get caught up in the ‘do it all’ mentality when developing your ideas. Instead of trying to solve every problem, focus on one and do a great job at it.

I may not have learned this valuable lesson at first, but lucky for you I can share this with you today. Are there any another valuable lessons you have learned? Feel free to share it in the comments section below.

photo credit: Yogendra174 via photopin cc