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business can live without. Anything that isn t driving
the business is dead weight ready to be cast overboard.
If you have a laptop, a chair, a desk, and an Internet
connection you have everything you need to be in the
video blogging business. No additional infrastructure is
necessary. Sure it would be nice to get fancy offices, a
great looking business card to impress your friends, and
of course a car-load of business stationery and supplies
from Staples to help you along. Forget about it! It s all
dead weight.
Buying all that crap only costs you time and money.
It s not going to make more people want to use your
video blogging service, and that s what matters.
It s not just the infrastructure of the business that you
can do without (remember if it ain t makin dollars it
ain t makin sense! ) but some aspects of your business
model as well. You can reduce the number of features
you create on your product, limit your market to just a
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domestic region, or skimp on the fancy design of your
website in exchange for more function.
For our video blogging service we need to have a
website up as soon as possible with the ability to view
videos and upload videos. That s it. The faster we get
that to market the faster we re adding customers. Some
day when we prove that this service makes money and
scales we can get around to finding office space,
writing a marketing plan, and giving everyone C-level
titles. For now our only focus is the business.
Recommendations:
" Take anything and everything that you can
possible live without off your to do list. If it
doesn t involve getting to market faster, proving
your assumptions, or generating revenue, dump
it!
" Just as a side note, you really can live on Ramen
Noodles, a dial-up connection, no heat or air
conditioning, and a crappy laptop for years. I
did it at Blue Diesel for three years and it
worked out just fine!
116 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
Summary
Go BIG companies understand that if it isn t time spent
growing the company or proving the business model,
it s time wasted. Startup companies simply cannot
afford to waste time, especially in today s business
climate when a year can mean the difference between
being the next Google and being one of the dozen
companies who tried to follow them.
To stay lean and mean you need to remain intensely
focused on the few aspects of your business that matter
getting customers and proving the business model.
The ideal Go BIG startup would have no overhead of
any sort just a few guys (and gals) in a room working
around the clock with a computer, a phone and a case of
Red Bull! Anything that isn t driving the ship forward
is an anchor holding it back. Nuff said.
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Chapter 7
Squeeze out the Air
Once you've cut the fat it's time to squeeze the empty
air out of your model. You may be focusing on the
most critical milestones of your business, but that
doesn't necessarily mean that you've found the fastest
and most efficient way to get them done.
Squeezing out the air is about taking what s left on your
plate (after you ve cut out the fat) and compressing it as
much as possible so that it gets done even faster.
While there are many places to compress timelines in a
business, the three that seem to pop up most often are
the timelines associated with sales cycles, marketing
launches, and product development. I ll cover each of
them individually so you can get a sense for how they
can (and should) be compressed.
118 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
Sales Cycles
Finding a way to squeeze your sales timelines is crucial
in a startup company where the next invoice could
translate into your next paycheck. Instead of worrying
about how to get by between long sales cycles, let s get
those cycles reduced so that the money comes in faster.
Offer less
Sometimes delivering a full-featured product results in
needing to ask too much (financially or otherwise) of
the customer, causing them to think twice about
spending their money or making a purchase
commitment.
The hold-up is not driven so much by their lack of
interest in your product as the size of commitment you
require them to make in one shot. In this case, consider
offering less of your product, which may reduce your
customer s price barriers and anxiety around making a
purchase decision.
At VideoBlog we may find that offering a
comprehensive video hosting solution that involves
gigabytes of space and tons of available bandwidth
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requires a great deal of cost on our part, so we need to
create a price that reflects this increased cost.
Unfortunately that increased price also causes our
potential customers to spend a little more time thinking
about our product before they make a decision to buy.
We ve just instigated a longer sales cycle.
Our solution would then be to create a smaller version
of the product that costs us less to deliver and drives the
price down to a point where the customer thinks it s a
no-brainer. Voila! Shorter sales cycles.
Recommendations:
" Analyze the drivers behind your sales cycles
what inhibits customer decisions? The faster
you break down those barriers the shorter your
sales cycles will be. Consider offering a bite
size version of your product that s easy for the
customer to digest.
Create a trial
For the same reasons you would offer less, consider
offering a trial. Trials don t require a customer to
commit and leaves their options open. The trial allows
your customer to get familiar with your product and
eases their way past any objections they might have if
you just threw a huge price on the table. As I ve said,
fewer customer objections mean a shorter closing time.
120 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
In the case of VideoBlog we may give customers the
ability to upload three of their videos to our site for free
since this doesn t cost us much and it pulls the
customer into a purchase decision by creating some
commitment to the product.
During this time we may also find that some of their
basic objections like will I understand how to use
this? are addressed quickly and therefore bring them
closer to a purchase decision. Most customers will feel
much better about your product once they ve gotten a
chance to play with it.
Recommendations:
" Give your customers something to play with.
The more time someone spends with your
product the more likely they are to adopt it.
Creating a trial allows you to get your product
into your customer s hands faster, and that
means your adoption begins faster.
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Development Timelines
Nothing is more frustrating than having a team that is
chomping at the bit to get a new product to market but
is mired in endless cycles of product development.
While we all want to produce an incredible product, we
don't want to wait forever to take it to market.
The faster you put a product out there, the faster a
customer can pay for it, and the faster you can reinvest
those earnings in growth. Here are a few ideas to
consider for shortening your development timelines.
Good enough is good enough
Not everything you create will be a masterpiece, and in
most cases it doesn t need to be. You may think that
one extra feature is going to make the difference to a
customer, but is it worth waiting another two months to
get it? Ask yourself, will your customers put your
product back on the shelf without that feature or will
this prolong your timeline without any meaningful
increase in revenue?
For our video blogging service we already agreed that
the most basic functionality the ability to upload and
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