Entrepreneurs who experience success with their first startup are often amazed to realize that the risks and fears of doing it right the second time go up, rather than down. Encores are tough, especially in the high-risk world of startups, yet every entrepreneur I know can’t wait to start over and do it again. Sometimes their haste or ego causes them to ignore basics, and they fall hard.
Every startup success is a function of great people, products, and profits. But there is no magic formula on how to bring these together a second time, but I did see some good insights on the parameters in a classic startup business parable, “Endless Encores,” by Ken Goldstein, who advises startups and has built companies in technology, entertainment, media, and e-commerce.
I have pulled together here a few of our joint recommendations to every entrepreneur and startup that I advise. These work the first time, and are required every time for success:
- Seek extraordinary people and revere talent. In the heat of the battle, when you have the least time and money to attract the best, it’s easy for an entrepreneur to settle for who is available, rather than who can bring real value and innovation to the business. Repeat leaders think more about talent, while short-term leaders worry first about output today.
- Hire for character, competency, and compatibility. Hiring is the single most important thing you do as a leader, and firing is second. It’s more than filling an open slot on your team. You start with skills, but then you have to delve deeply into motivation, trust, ambition, chemistry, and experience.
- Diversity on your team expands thinking. Hiring people who are just like you may eliminate revolts, but it won’t get you outside your own box. Creativity requires constructive conflict, a willingness to collaborate, dealing with failure, and boundless iteration. Solution and business model innovation require pushing the limits.
- Self-demanding beats boss-demanding every time. Startup successes are never perfect. Too many entrepreneurs are their own worst enemy, trying to do everything right the next time. Remember to embrace pragmatic goals and solutions, and accept a little bit of luck and assistance along the way. Perfectionists never win in the startup business.
- Leapfrog products invent and reinvent markets. Incremental product ideas do not change markets. It takes a paradigm shift, like autos to airplanes. On the other hand, making the user experience easier, richer, and more pleasant, as Apple has done repeatedly, can reinvent existing markets. Focus on the customer for repeated success.
- Eat your own dog food. If you don’t, why should they? The basic premise is that if a startup expects paying customers to use its products or services, it should expect no less from its own team. There is no better way to get quick and honest feedback on strengths, weaknesses, and usability. Even encore startups should expect to pivot to get it right.
- A business model is not an after-thought. Passion and ego are no substitute for a business model that makes sense. Some entrepreneurs are so enamored by their first success that they inherently believe that their next idea will make even more money. If your solution is free, or you lose money on every sale, it’s hard to make it up in volume.
- Strategy is charting a course, not making a move. Implementing a strategy doesn’t force the answer you want, so it pays to map out the alternatives and envision the possible as well as the problematic. Markets change rapidly these days, so the strategy that brought you success the first time, may lead to your demise the second time.
- Recurring revenue is the foundation for growth. Everyone loves the subscription model, since transaction costs exclude the cost of acquiring a new customer. Investors love this and other recurring revenue models because they facilitate growth through scaling. Sometimes repeat entrepreneurs forget that they must acquire new customers.
- Use cash wisely, as if it were out of your own pocket. Every new startup has extensive cash flow out, before any flows in. Serial entrepreneurs, with new bigger ideas, often forget that part of the equation, and are caught short. Repeating successfully means the same focus and due diligence on cash you had the first time around.
