The Pillars of a Successful Startup

A startup mentality is a skill learned the hard way. Dozens of project management methodologies, a variety of tech stacks, multiple scaling approaches and tools, and never-ending best practices for internal workflow mapping — each of these aspects takes time to investigate, experiment with, and make conclusions about how suitable a specific strategy is. No wonder so many startups eventually go down in flames: way too many first-time entrepreneurs are simply not ready for all the hidden bottlenecks of the startup environment.

Being among the 10% of startups that survive and become successful in their niche is not a matter of luck — that’s what I have to admit after being a part of several startup projects. While pointing out the right market fit might be the intuitive step, the ability to launch and scale a project efficiently is a practice mastered with experience and, in most cases, a whole portfolio of failures.

The thing is: there is no secret formula for turning startups into unicorns. Yet some practices and project management tools can help young entrepreneurs avoid the most common early-stage startup bottlenecks. I’d like to share some that I use myself to make each startup stage more organized, well-planned, and set up for success.

Get lean: Take timely action

That’s the core principle of any lean startup goes as follows: don’t chase perfection before testing the ground. Sounds simple, right? Yet, in reality, it might be more challenging than it seems: there is always an urge to add an extra feature or go a little bit further with the project scale than initially planned. With lean thinking, such traps can be avoided.

Lean thinkers look for ways to test the product with minimal costs at the early project stages and even prior to its launch. That’s where real entrepreneurship kicks in, and when it comes to potential options — for creative minds, the sky is the limit.

Accelerating the pace of a project’s time-to-market is one of the most valuable lessons I learned over the course of years. It eliminates the project’s over-complexity, it doesn’t deplete the resources, and, most important, it helps project teams better understand gaps in the market and adapt the product’s functionality accordingly.

Yet there is a catch: an accelerated launch means nothing without product viability. If the newly launched solution cannot cover the basic user needs and address the issue it’s supposed to solve, it means you’re doing it wrong.

Another common mistake among inexperienced startup teams is equaling MVP scaling to a constant reinvention. While there is nothing wrong with innovations as such, the teams who rebuild an MVP completely to make its next release an upgraded version of it eventually find themselves losing their tested market niche, failing to meet users’ initial expectations, and, in many cases, running out of funds to keep on with such an approach.

The moral of this story? Build the MVP with scaling in mind. Introduce the big product’s vision to its potential users while giving them only a glimpse of it in the first launch. Show them where your product can take them, making them want more of it. Feed users’ interest gradually and make their feedback a part of the scaling process. Keep enough space for the project to evolve and adapt to the changing consumer needs by making regular product improvements an integral part of your business strategy. Trust me — these rules never grow old.

Let the synergy of techniques work for you

Many startup teams get locked up in their own processes, forgetting it’s the system that should work for them, not vice versa. Others jump from one methodology to another, dragging their project into a never-ending circle of workflow restructuring and chaotic project execution.

Out of many startups I’ve worked at, the most successful were those whose teams were not afraid to combine various approaches. This unique balance of flexibility and structure is what made the project go smoothly from one stage to another one.

If you’re wondering if design thinking, lean startup methodology, and an agile approach can work together — the answer is yes. See the graph below illustrating how it can be achieved.

What’s the best part about this funnel? It can be adapted at various project stages and work equally well for almost all of them. Whether it’s MVP development, product/market fit, or product scaling — the combination of lean, agile, and design thinking best practices can make decision-making easier, processes smoother, and teams more productive.

Risk mitigation planning

It has to be admitted that startup entrepreneurs are incurable optimists. Yet it doesn’t exclude the fact that worst-case scenarios should be well thought out. While risk mitigation planning is often neglected among early-stage startups, I’d advise every project team to pay close attention to it.

Including this practice in the project planning agenda often differentiates successful startups from failed ones. Below is the approach I’ve always used working at startups, and we never regretted making it as detailed as possible, even if we didn't have to actually address those risks.

Having project risks prioritized and various outcome scenarios considered allowed my project team to feel better prepared for any upcoming challenges, but not only that. It also raised the bar on the quality of work within the project scope since all team members were more aware of the responsibility they held within the project.

Final thoughts

Is it an all-inclusive list of the startup best-case practices? It’s far from being the case. Project staffing, documentation, strategy mapping, product positioning, and tech stack, are only some of the many additional factors that need to be worked on. However, in my experience, these several techniques have proved themselves as the ones that can make the project’s pathway to success faster, smoother, and more cost-effective. By creating a synergy between these approaches and other proven methods, your startup can become more resistant to market challenges and emerging process bottlenecks — and that’s the way to go.

Lead image generated by stable diffusion.