Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 12. Focus

Jared Polis

Jared is one of the founders of TechStars. He is also the founder of BlueMountainArts.com and ProFlowers, among many other companies. Jared is also currently serving as a U.S. Congressman for the second district of Colorado.

Ideas are easy to come by. I have had many that I never had time to see through and heard many other good ones from flakes and drifters, but I believe the key to success is focusing on a good idea and implementing it well. In the case of ProFlowers, my idea was to disintermediate the supply chain by sending flowers directly from the grower to the customer, delivering fresher flowers at a better price.

From there, it became a matter of focusing on the implementation. I had to invent a system to get the orders to the growers. Since many flower growers were extremely low tech at the time and couldn't be relied upon for Internet access, we created a foolproof way of faxing FedEx labels directly to the growers right on sticky peel-off paper for them to affix to the boxes. We also had to become good at marketing and customer acquisition. To be the best if no one else knew about us would have meant limited success. So, after we raised capital, we hired top-notch direct marketers and became great at getting new customers. The company grew rapidly since I founded it in 1998, went public in 2004, and had over $250 million in sales when it was ...