How can you ensure your startup development aligns with long-term goals?

There is only one true way to validate your concept… a market test, at the cash register. Many people will stroke your ego, until you ask for payment. The only “votes” that count are the votes at the cash register.

Plan A. Conduct thorough market research to ensure there is a demand for your product or service. If possible, offer a product or service for free to catch the potential customers. Validate your business idea by obtaining feedback from potential customers and identifying early adopters. Plan B. Once a large audience, interest is captured, initiate a plan b with the right judgement to make it profitable.

☝️Las pruebas de suposiciones en un entorno laboral son importantes porque le permiten determinar si una idea, creencia o hipótesis es correcta o incorrecta. ☝️Al verificarlos, obtendrá información precisa y basada en evidencia que lo ayudará a tomar mejores decisiones y evitar errores costosos. ☝️La validación de supuestos también contribuye a un ambiente de aprendizaje y mejora continua, ya que permite ajustar y aplicar ideas en función de los resultados obtenidos. ☝️Evitar chismes, prejuicios, malas interpretaciónes, ayudara a obtener el rendimiento indicado y la rentabilidad del negocio, con el valioso equipo de trabajo, se refuerza el sentido de pertenencia y permanencia en la organización.

Is your product or service offering genuine value? To answer this question with confidence, you must deeply understand the customer's pain points.

To ensure startup development syncs with long-term objectives: User Testing: Engage actual users for product testing to gather genuine feedback. Data Collection: Accumulate quantitative data to understand user preferences and product performance. Market Validation: Survey target market to gauge if the product fulfills their needs and desires. Business Model Examination: Validate if the model is not only effective in the short-term but is also scalable for growth. Competitor Analysis: Regularly review competitor solutions to ensure your product maintains a unique edge. Iterative Learning: Embrace failures as learning opportunities, refining your strategy based on these insights.

In my experience, the only constant is change. You need to be dynamic and fluid, and need to adapt to survive. Otherwise, someone else will.

Your start up will not be the same business as the one operating in 3 years time - you have to adapt. SKOOT started as a carpooling app helping reduce congestion and fundamentally reduce CO2 emissions. Launching in March20 was not great - we had just gone into lockdown. So we had to pivot adding in a feature called Errands to help during Covid. Once out of lockdown we again adapted, but kept to our ethos of helping the planet. SKOOT's focus is about rebuilding eco-systems, whilst supporting the poorest communities globally. By adapting our model through trial and error we have enabled consumers to join us on our journey and encourage everyone to pay a low cost effective eco-contribution in everyday transactions.

In my experience, adaptation is the only way your startup survives. As you validate your idea with customers who have a pain point, you will realise they are willing to pay for certain features while many of your features might have very little traction. Ultimately, sunsetting features that are of little use, and focus on features that your customers are willing to use and pay for, will shape your product over time.

Leadership can feel like being in a whirlwind. Things fly by, time seems to both fly and standstill, progress can seem elusive, and it’s just energetic, emotional, chaos. This frenetic and sometimes frantic time leads to: 1. Prioritizing only that which you can grasp 2. Feeling overwhelmed all the time 3. Losing direction/ only reacting 4. Getting hooked on the energy To adapt effectively: 1. Step away (physically and mentally) to analyze actual progress towards goals 2. Gather crucial data/voices on progress and growth 3. Analyze whether the change that you feel you need is market, product, or operationally driven (ie is this “change” necessary and from where) 4. Plan before acting The crazier it gets, the more you need to slow down

Change is good, until it’s not; Understand and appreciate you and your team’s tolerance for change, prepare for it and commit to it.

Communicate honestly, in a clear voice, and often, both internally and externally. Align on mission. Ask for feedback every time. Listen. Rinse and repeat.

When stakeholders, including internal teams, aren't aligned, they can easily get sidetracked by every "good idea" that comes their way. While there are many good ideas out there, not all of them align with long-term goals. For instance, if your long-term goal is to establish leadership in B2B business, focusing on consumers (B2C) can be distracting, even if it seems appealing on the surface. To address this challenge, you should: 1. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Then communicate some more. 2. Prioritize initiatives on the basis of how they serve the communicated goals. 3. Review and assess goals and priorities on a regular (but not too frequent) basis.

There are many people who you “want” to please, but the most important group are the customers who pay their bills. Everyone else is secondary!

In serving the customer, you must align the team not to the service you offer but to the language of the customer need. Understanding the customer and helping your team internalize that message team will inform how they interact with the customer. This will improve your retention long term and buy social capital for those times when things get messed up.

Your team is only as good as the people you select and the processes you establish. Think carefully about who should join and how they will work together. Be extremely thoughtful about adding roles and growing your team, as costs and inefficiencies can balloon quickly.

Accountability and transparency are key. Every team member must have an owner mentality and every leader on the team must be obsessed with continually improving their department.

Avoid this short-term mindset. Build a culture obsessed with excellence, not just expedience. Deliver an exceptional product that solves real customer problems. Refine and improve based on user feedback, not just moving fast to the next feature. Optimize for learning, listening and iterating - not just speed of development. Focus on depth before breadth. Do a few things incredibly well before expanding your focus. Build processes that allow for scalability while maintaining quality control. Your long-term success will be driven by delighted customers who find enduring value in your offering. Stay committed to delivering substantive solutions, not just growth hacks.

IF you are looking to develop something "real", honest and longlasting then in my experience you need to constantly drive the focus on generating value and ensuring that the quality of product or services meet the expectations - think carefully if you want to exceed them.

☝️Tener un enfoque en calidad y valor es importante porque garantiza la satisfacción del cliente internos y externos, todo deberá sumar a la excelencia en los productos o servicios que se ofrecen. ☝️Al enfocarse en la calidad, se busca cumplir con los estándares más altos y superar las expectativas de los clientes, lo que genera confianza, fidelidad y una buena reputación. ☝️No, omito qué al agregar valor a través de características distintivas, mejoras continuas y soluciones innovadoras, se destaca en el mercado y se crea una ventaja competitiva sólida. ☝️Esto conduce al éxito a largo plazo y a relaciones duraderas con los clientes.

Quality and value when it comes to startups should be focused almost entirely on the customer experience. How the customer engages and interacts with the business and the value you provide is more important in many ways than just solving their problems. During this phase of your development customers are your best source of data.

Annual reinvention is always worth consideration. Continuous and never ending improvement is always a good idea! What’s working? What’s not working? Keep your thumb on the pulse of your marketplace!

Regularly review your product development roadmap to evaluate if features and functionality being built will help achieve goals. Be willing to pause certain initiatives if they no longer fit or are not bringing you closer to your long-term vision. Gather feedback from customers, partners and employees to improve understanding of what is and isn't working. Make adapting your strategy an ongoing process as the market provides new insights and opportunities emerge.

In my opinion there are 3 key factors to consider for a healthy development of a startup. Point nr. 1 is to focus of an organic growth. Don't over accelerate the pace just because it is possible. Savvy investors are happier when they invest in a solid growth and stable business rather than a warp speed doped growth facing several down rounds afterwards. Nr. 2: Spend your money wisely. Don't over-hire and overspend just because you are sitting on some VC's money. Nr. 3: Focus on your business model. Profits are what it counts at the end of the day.

Well said, Barbaro! One way to focus on organic growth is to keep marketing and business development internal for as long as it takes to get to know the market and to identify your minimal viable segment and their needs.

Learn to keep long term goals grandeur while short term efforts modular. This allows you to pivot nimbly and not have your early stage efforts all go down to waste just because you realize at later stage they don't cog well with your long term vision. You will have a better chance of recycling at least some of your earlier developments (modules). This is from a product build perspective.