We were enjoying Oktoberfest recently and it brought to mind that this is a great time to remind everyone to beware the temptation to hunt down or create an eierlegende Wollmilchsau, the mythical German egg-laying, wool-providing, milk-producing sow.
A graphic way of describing the tendency to want to deliver all things to all people.
This is something we see often with tech startups. You’ve got great technology, now you have to get it to market. The danger is in trying to deliver everything on the first go around to every potential customer for every conceivable application.
Stop! Trying to deliver everything to everybody is the antithesis of what you need to do to get your product out on a timely basis and to begin generating revenue.
Instead, see if you can isolate/find/identify a reduced subset of customers, determine a reduced set of features that come closest to delivering what that customer set needs, and build the minimum viable product (MVP) to get your product out the door, and take it from there.
Allow your customers and the market to confirm what your next step should be.
To our friends and colleagues in Germany, we hope you had an enjoyable Oktoberfest! And to our friends and colleagues in America, yeah, that usually starts in September.
Dr. Kevin Fahey, Founder and CEO of Market Operandi
About the Author:
Kevin Fahey, Ph.D, leads the Market Operandi team in bringing their technical and executive management expertise to deep tech B2B startups and innovation teams at larger organizations, enabling them to scale rapidly while mitigating risks. He and his team also help companies penetrate new markets and optimize for multi-market growth.
Over the past decade, Kevin has used his diverse experience to create MO's proprietary and vetted startup acceleration systems and framework, successfully guiding dozens of startups from their first institutional round of funding to and through their growth rounds.
As CEO of MO, Kevin has steered multiple obscure startups to become award-winning success stories.
Kevin holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Image courtesy of de:User:Pixelrausch, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons