Re:The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth
by wpietri on Saturday April 28, 2012 @11:38PM
(#3905005)
There's an important difference, though.
At my startup we've tried a lot of things, but we try them serially. We went through a bunch of ideas early on, doing our best to kill the idea in prototype. Here my co-founder talks about how we spent 6 weeks to kill an idea that other people spent 9 months (and millions of dollars) to kill:
The failure mode that Suster talks about is trying to do all the ideas in parallel. I agree that startups should try a lot of things, but strongly believe they should focus on one at a time.
A "startup" is a company in search of a successful business model. Those that fail will leave behind a record of many failed explorations, making it look as thought this was the "cause" of their failure. Perhaps they just failed to find their successful business model. Perhaps it was never there. That said, I do agree with the author. Focus is key.