Lao Tzu once said, "Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time,' is like saying, 'I don't want to.'”
While young startups focus on branding and world-changing ideas, it’s their inability to use their time correctly that is the biggest threat to their emerging product.
There are startups that move too slowly, meticulously building their product while someone beats them to market. Conversely, you have startups that cut corners to build fast but deteriorate when their mistakes come back to haunt them.
“Everyone in a startup is either excited about an idea or excited about an opportunity so they jump in and optimistically estimate how long it's going to take, getting themselves in trouble on either the time side or on the financial side,” said Chip Donatone, SVP of Engineering Operations at . “One of the things that I have seen that has really sunk several of the startups that I’ve been a part of or I’ve seen is the inability to estimate correctly how much it's going to cost to build their product.”
Keep your ducks in a row
The old adage “time is money” has never rang more true than in the office of a five person startup. The current tech culture promotes innovation and driving forward, it does not however put as much emphasis on the importance of documentation. As any established dev team will tell you, taking time for early documentation pays off. Once the company gains momentum, turning around to fix a bug can bring everything to a halt or, in many cases, derail it entirely.
Backtracking as a young company costs founders time and money — two things that are in short supply. In hindsight, successful startup founders frequently stress the importance of implementing the right tracking and monitoring tools at an early stage in order to be able to effectively tackle any operational support issues they might face later on.
“We ended up shedding off new feature work for three weeks while everyone went back in,” said Six Actual CEO Josh Morris, recalling a struggle with a prior company. “It would have only been an extra hour or two a week to include enough operational detail in logging early on.”
Anticipate failures
There’s a bevy of organizational tips to prevent future time-sucks but the reality is that they are going to happen. It’s inevitable. But putting aside time for tweaks and repairs can seem almost impossible when building the roadmap for your product but there is no alternative.
“You can’t afford not to,” urged Morris. “The reality is that you will make compromises in everything you do because you never have enough time and resources. You have to have a backup plan and you have to factor in a little bit of bandwidth on your roadmaps to make sure that you're able to handle these issues when they happen. Simply put, you have to invest in operational readiness and tooling.”
Sweat the small stuff
Building your product is important, there is no doubt about that, but there is a lot more to running a business. It’s not the sexy stuff you envision in your entrepreneurial mind, it’s the gritty little things that really begin to eat away at your bandwidth.
"When you’re with a startup, generally you’re starting everything from scratch,” Donatone explained. “It sounds romantic but there’s work everywhere you look. So there is no HR, there is no corporate website, and there is no policy built. Everybody gets so product focused that they don’t realize that all of the things it takes to run a business are a time suck and can actually compete with the ability to get a product out the door. I see those things really butt heads between the business and the technical side.”
Whether you need a little guidance building your company’s software or are looking for some major help as you scale, SixActual has the experience to help your startup find the right path. Visit their site to learn more.
