You Can’t & You Can

Every new startup I talk to recently seems to have a problem with picking their best opportunity to win market and remaining focused. 

You can’t 

You can’t address every market, not initially.

You can’t have every feature, in your first release.

You can’t afford every marketing channel or experiment or advertising special offer, conference, event, put to you by a sales person or sent to you in an email, you only have limited bullets to fire.

You can’t wait until its perfect, you have reduce it to the bare essentials, make a call and ship what you have.

You can’t have all the resources you want, now or ever.

You can

You can focus on the single market where you are best positioned to win, the market who absolutely needs your product and ignore the less deserving segments for now.

You can choose the 1-2 most important goals to pursue and exclude the others

You can choose to focus on the critical 1-2 actions that you want your customer to take (that drive everything else).

You can choose to do a fantastic job of building the 1-2 essential features that define your product, to the exclusion of other bells and whistles.

You can be resourceful, crafty, thrifty, cheeky, relentless and hustle, possibly all at the same time.

Thanks to CSIRO Images Morgan Brown for the Feature Image under Creative Commons