The Start-Up J Curve: The Six Steps to Entrepreneurial Success

by Howard Love

Fortunately, both entrepreneurs and financial backers recognized that they were counterproductive. Too often, they locked start-ups into an inflexible business plan that was ill suited to the company’s evolution.

a cofounder should help you be more intellectually honest, a huge saver of time.

I’ll talk about this failing a bit later, but for now, make sure you don’t even think about scaling until you have a product that a sizable number of customers love and you have nailed the business model.

When you get bigger, a lot of pressure is exerted on every part of your start-up, and if you scale at the wrong time, that pressure can destroy the company.

Prior to Scale, marketing wasn’t a priority; you only needed to obtain a sufficient number of customers in order to set up a good feedback loop.

The pitch that classic venture firms love is, We have an amazing product, a huge market, and a massive customer adoption. Plus, we just turned on the revenue model, and it’s working. We’re looking for some money to make this a much bigger enterprise. If you really have that in a convincing way, the VCs will practically lock the conference room doors and do a deal with you on the spot.

Of course, as I am fond of saying, the world is rarely black or white. It’s a gray and complex situation when you’re stuck in start-up limbo—you haven’t exactly failed, but you haven’t exactly succeeded either.