Startup CXO

Chapter 99Starting Things

As I mentioned before, if you have the opportunity to start an idea and a company from scratch, it's a great and humbling experience. You get to solve a problem for a customer in a specific way and get them to pay you for that solution. You get to build a team and set a culture, and you get to pick the technology and build the product that will change the world—or at least you hope for all that!

In this chapter I want to outline a few of the practices that I use when starting something from scratch.

Startups face two initial challenges before they can shift to growth mode. The first challenge is to define their idea (that will become a product) and determine if it addresses a problem that's worth solving. The second challenge is to build the first version of that product and get to product/market fit, which is the moment where customers are paying for your product and you are retaining them.

If this is a raw startup, then you are creating a product and a company at the same time. I like to use Ash Maurya's Lean Canvas, from his (2012) startup book Running Lean, to document the initial business plan. The Lean Canvas is a one‐page business model template that is simple and quick to use to capture the building blocks of your business model and then systematically test each element until the idea is sufficiently validated or de‐risked to continue. For defining and validating the idea, you have to get out and talk to potential customers to understand if ...