The success of a startup can depend in large measure on how effectively it uses limited time and money. While “Be Upbeat” deals with the heart, today I’ll discuss “Be Focused” as next on the AccelerEyes’ culture list.
Here are 3 important ways to Be Focused:
1) Focus product to an appropriately sized target market
One of the biggest mistakes startups make is to not focus their product on an appropriately sized target market. In technical computing, there are two great examples of companies that had poor levels of focus.
Rapidmind was a Canadian company involved in building libraries for GPUs. However, in addition to GPUs, they were also chasing multi-core CPUs, FPGAs, Cell processors, and more. Despite raising $10 million in VC, their ambitions were too broad and the company ultimately did not achieve the depth they needed in any one area to get good traction.
On the flip side, Simatra Technologies overly narrowed their focus to tools for only a small niche of the technical computing market, involved in “simulation of differential equations and dynamical systems.” This company ultimately failed due to its inability to address a sufficiently large market. Once their SBIR funding dried up, the company could not sustain itself.
At AccelerEyes, we spent the first 5 years of the company laser focused on building deep in the GPU computing space. We ignored other distractions. This choice was critical to our early success.
2) Focus employee concentration in the office
Another aspect of being focused is to achieve significant allotments of time in the office where employees are concentrated on efficient production. This is often hard to achieve, especially in startups where there are so many business aspects going on in the same room at the same time.
At AccelerEyes, product development requires deep concentration on complicated programming challenges. It takes time to properly load the problem into your head and spin up a workspace before you can actually start making progress. Distractions require unloading that important information, resulting in much more downtime than just the direct distraction minutes.
We’re not perfect at avoiding distractions. But we do try to reduce them by:
- using headphones to shut out distractions
- using Skype to message each other more discreetly
- limiting the number of people that jump on phone calls
Also, it is important for the entrepreneur to physically be present in the office as much as possible.
3) Focus on building a company, not partnerships
One of the not-so-obvious ways to be focused is to avoid the early temptation to entertain exciting requests and opportunities for seemingly beneficial partnerships. The truth is that startups should say “No” to 99% of partnership opportunities.
It is much better to spend those early days implementing inside sales and marketing automation mechanisms. It is better to focus nearly 100% of your effort on developing direct customer relationships. Partnership development efforts result more often in unrealized promises than actual teeth. There is more time at a later stage of a startup (e.g. after you have a product with good traction) to develop meaningful partnerships.
What does your startup do to stay focused? How do you keep the concentration levels high in the office? What approach do you take to partnership opportunities?
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