Everyone knows that great startups begin in a garage, where a brilliant college dropout works day and night on an unprecedented idea. Once the idea goes public, the founder is on the road to success. But of course, you already know it doesn’t work that way.
The importance of great execution
But we still tend to overestimate the importance of the “big and unique idea”.
The desire to solve a real problem with a realistic solution is the starting point, but I (and much more experienced founders) would argue that this is not even half of what it takes to build a successful business. The bigger part of success is great execution.
Take Google as an example. Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not have the idea for a search engine. When they founded Google in 1998, there were already over a dozen other search engines on the market.
And although Google’s search results were better than the others, the company owed its victory in large part to its focus on search, its ease of use and a new ad placement concept.
Just take a look at Google, Yahoo! and Excite in the year 2000 through the Wayback machine to feel the difference for yourself.
Executing simply means putting your ideas into action. When you start a business, you have to build everything from scratch.
The team, the product, the business model, the marketing, and all with very little time, money and experience. No matter how good your idea is, if you can’t bring it to market in the right way, you will fail.
So how can you go about implementing it properly?
How to get it right
What you should never do is just run and hope it turns out well. Every founder needs to take a leap of faith from time to time, but eventually one of those leaps will be your last one.
What you should do is learn from experienced entrepreneurs and their journey of success and failure. Every startup is different and messy, but there are best practices that generally work well.
As Eric Rise (The lean startup) puts it: Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught. But finding the right advice can be difficult and time consuming.
This is where this blog can help by presenting simple, proven and actionable frameworks you can apply to your own situation. I focus on frameworks because they are easy to remember and can guide your thinking in the right direction without overloading you with information