Your First idea is only the Beginning

Like everything else in this life, the plan for your new startup company will almost certainly change beyond anything you could have contemplated. 

We would all love to think that we can have one new product idea that is so brilliant we never need to change a thing, but that rarely happens. In fact, many successful companies launch with one idea in mind but become fabulously successful by shifting directions completely.

Google started out just powering keyword searches before they realized they could become a massive advertising platform.  The founders of PayPal thought they were going to build a company that beamed payments between Palm Pilots before they shifted focus to power payments on eBay.

Ideas, even the ones that are the basis for your entire company, were made to be changed.  It’s important, however, to understand why those ideas change and how to feel comfortable reacting to them.

You don’t have a Customer

A big part of the reason startup companies have to change product strategies early in the game is because they are only guessing at what the customer really wants. 

Sure, you may get some focus groups that tell you what they’re willing to buy, but until someone actually writes a check for your product, it’s still an educated guess at best.  Only when the product hits the shelves and people react with their wallets can you truly evaluate the idea. 

Prior to having real customers, it’s fair to assume that your product idea is only in “beta mode”.  Assume that the product will likely change dramatically based on true market testing with real customers on a sustained basis.  In the event that your initial idea is spot on and no changes need to be made, you’ve become the exception, not the rule.

You don’t have any Scale

Even if the first few customers do purchase your initial product just as you had envisioned, the product still isn’t truly tested until you’ve sold enough of it. 

You may think that just because the neighborhood wives have all bought your fancy homemade hand lotion that you’ve got it figured out.  But until the product can sell next to dozens of others on the shelves at Wal-Mart, you really don’t know how great it is.

It’s easy to get excited about the success of a small market test or an initial reaction to your product, especially if people are buying.  But that doesn’t mean the idea and its success will necessarily scale to a bigger company.  Like not having any customers to begin with, not having any great amount of scale in your sales relegates you to still having to guess whether your product is ready for the big leagues.

You may find that the approach that works for your local market only makes sense for that audience.  Once again, you’ll have to be prepared to consider drastic changes to your product if you want to reach a much more substantial audience.

You don’t have a Company

There’s a big difference between solving a problem on paper with your business plan and building a successful company with that same idea.  Until you’ve tried to build an entire business around your idea, especially one that employs lots of other people, you still don’t know how well that idea translates into a growing company.

Many ideas work great to support just one person, and that’s OK too.  However if the business idea only works if you’re the person creating all of the work, it may need to be modified to scale.  Some ideas, like offering consulting services based on your personal wisdom, will need to change significantly if you’re going to scale them past just yourself.

The goal of a business is usually to solve a customer’s problem, not to solve the problem of building a company.  So it’s no surprise that in order to support the growth of the company, you may have to broaden or change the focus of the product accordingly.

Prepare for Change

No matter what your cause for change, and truthfully it will probably be all of the items mentioned above, you need to embrace that things will inevitably shift, maybe even dramatically.

With so many unknown factors going into your startup company’s launch, it would actually be a miracle if you were to pick the perfect product without any real market testing.  For those of you that are truly the prophets of product development, we salute you and your wisdom.

For the rest of us poor schleps that aren’t as all-knowing, it’s back to the drawing board over and over until we find a fit that works.