Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Richard LUck
Business advice is like cell phone service:you can get it virtually anywhere andat anytime — except at the exact time and place where you truly need it. That, and it’s getting cheaper everyday.
By the time you finish reading this, odds are a half-dozentips-n-tricks, how-to’s, or top-five lists will have been published to yourfavorite blog or online business journal, each telling you exactly what you need to do—and in whatorder—to ensure that your company comes out on top.
This is not one of those articles.
Instead, this is a simple list of three things you can dotoday to save yourself the agony, heartache, lost sleep, and stupid argumentswith your significant other that will inevitably come about as a result of youspending every waking moment trying to make a go of your fledglingstart-up. Do these three thingsand you can kill your company quickly, freeing you to move on to other moreproductive, 9-to-5-ish, less insane endeavors.
Step 1: Don’t WorryAbout How You’ll Make Money
Come on, face it. All of the really cool companies out there didn’t know how they weregoing to make money when they first started. You’re young. You’re hip. You wear Out Of Print tees to your co-working officespace. Why should you worry aboutmaking money either? The real value isin the eyeballs, man.
Forget for a moment the simple fact that statisticallyspeaking you have a greater chance of contracting—and dying from—the bubonic plague than you do of founding thenext Facebook, Twitter, or other hot Web 2.0 start-up. Revenue is for sissies. It’s for those strange little companies who’s name no one canremember and who never, ever make the homepage of TechCrunch.
If you want your company to die quickly, don’t ask yourselfon day one of your start-up: what can we sell, will people buy it, and how muchcan we charge for it? Leave thatto someone else.
Step 2: Chase YourCompetition Relentlessly
There is no drama quite like melodrama. And nothing creates melodrama morequickly than picking a competitor and publicly, if not aggressively, pursuingthem in every endeavor.
When your competition goes left, you go left. But moreleft. And with more bravado.
When your primary competitor announces a new feature, youannounce two new features of yourown. And ensure that the marketingmaterial you put out mentions in bold type that these features are madepossible by the heavy use of AJAX, or tablelessdatabases, or some other technology that is so new that only you, your leaddeveloper, and the technology’s inventor even know about it.
Don’t worry about being different. Being different is for losers (remember high-school). Be better. Be faster. Andby all means, be cheaper.
With this laser-like focus on your competition you won’thave to worry about what the market actually wants from your company. You’ll have a big target that you can throw all of your developmentand marketing resources at. You’llcreate a sense of excitement in the marketplace; the kind that hasn’t been seensince the Browser-Wars of the late ‘90’s. You and your competition will burn through piles of cash in a death-raceto the bottom. With any luckat all your company will be dead before they start writingabout you in the papers.
Step 3: Never Talk toCustomers.
Customers are idiots.
All of them.
They don’t know what they want. They don’t know how to describe it. And when you build it for them, theycomplain constantly that you didn’t do it right. As if that weren’t enough, when you finally do buildsomething that they seem to like, they nag you constantly to add more featuresto the product to make it easier to use, or to integrate it with some otheruseless system.
You know this business better than any customer evercould. You’ve spent years in theindustry. Or maybe a fewmonths. Or perhaps you just talkedabout it with a friend over beers and thought, after the third round, that itwould be a great idea to start a business around this idea—because every othercompany that’s in the space is completelymissing the point.
If you follow only one piece of advice, follow this one: ignore your customers and your business will die quickerthan you could possibly fathom.
