Startups need to be strategic and purposeful in their approach. Although they may at times appear to be whimsical and intuitive in nature, so much has been said and done in the startup world that the business world must take them seriously.
I received a traditional and classic academic formation in business and finance. To me a business was a profit and loss and a balance sheet, and a strategy was a 60 pg business plan, with a series of management frameworks to follow.
My personal transformative experience with startups was reading Eric Ries ‘The Lean Startup´
To me The Lean Startup is the answer to the question many startup founders have about their business strategy. Of course today there are derivations from that book that take the central lessons and improve upon them, but it remains the core.
Here are a few extracts:
1 — Build validated traction from a series of experiments known as Minimum Viable Product
2 — Ensure your user base or early adopters are engaged by your prdocuts by conducting experiments that allow you to learn new things about your product so that you can create solutions or features around them. Measure the degree of customer success and how you positively improve and affect your customers, this will be the basis for your value proposition.
3 — understand the engines of growth for your business, whether its viral, sticky or paid
The ultimate strategy for your business is to build a product that users want. That engagement needs to be measured and qualified following a series of experiments, whether successful or failed, which will ultimately create value for users.
That value needs to result in a product that users are willing to pay for as that is the ultimate test.
That is, in summary, the essence for any startup strategy. If you can acheive that repeatedly and at scale, you won´t have trouble raising funds.
