What is the life cycle of a startup idea?
Let’s abstract ourselves from what you specifically do and just brainstorm.
After we have figured out how we can implement our idea, whether it is coded, purchased and delivered, produced in a factory or assembled in a facility, we commence to think about promotion and sales.
What will it be in our case? SMM, SEO, online or offline advertising, landing page with PPC campaign? There are many tools to achieve the goal. And which one should we choose?
We spend our time to decide what method of promoting our product we will use, we think through everything carefully and in advance, and in most cases, everything coined and planned does not work.
There is a legend that the CIA usually simply trash the first two versions of plans for upcoming operations, since they are too obvious, including its understanding of the enemy as well. So the real discussion occur only with the third option.
I personally don’t know how true the story about the CIA is, but frankly speaking, this approach is used in many companies. And as practice shows, this approach really works.
And then a thought comes up on mind… What if we immediately take such a risk into account when make our startup to materialize? But what if you initially assume that the first few most obvious methods will not work? What will you come up with after you find out that the most obvious methods do not work in your case? What will you do to promote your startup that is not obvious at all?
Of course, you can exclaim: this is some kind of growthhacking… And I’m totally agreeing with you. In fact, the conversation is about “hacking”. During the development process, a startup solves two main problems: the first is what client pain should be solved and in what manner: that’s a problemhacking, the second is how to tell people about it: that one goes for growthhacking.
This is how you can find your secret sauce. And it magically works when you inject it into your startup. This is actually how a startup becomes successful. So maybe this could be a great point where we should start then?
As a result, we have an excellent starting position for an open chat with ourselves about what we will do when the MVP is ready, but the promotion plan does not work?.. This can’t happen! And is our plan really sure to work?
Of course, I absolutely trust your competencies and am confident in you as a professional in your field. However, I think that it is worth taking into account that a startup is not so much like assembling a figure from spares into some predictable shape, but about the ability to find non-obvious approaches and means – that is the secret sauce.
And “assembling a figure from spares” into a finished shape according to a calculated blueprint is already discourse about an established business. There you should ask completely different questions, and that’s another story…