Silicon Valley is well known because of its revolutionary ideas, grandiose statements and ability to challenge the status quo. By now, we’re all familiar with the timeless persona of the Bay Area-located, hoodie-wearing techie, that tells their workforce to”proceed quick and break things” in order to”disrupt” total industries.
But what those promising to change the world in their Silicon Valley office tend to overlook is that so many of the significant technology giants started by addressing a small however present pain point within a certain local group.
Ultimately, finding a simple but crucial problem and matching it with all the ideal strategy potential will always function as the foundation of a prosperous business. You don’t need to put out to become a multi-billion-dollar business and uproot total techniques in order to have impact.
Silicon Valley story is often detrimental to budding entrepreneurs
The large tech landscape will be to foster the notion that startups have to improve the world with their new products or services. Venture capital (VC) investors in the Valley even compound this notion by consistently shifting their capital into insecure, high-return organizations using strategies to disrupt entire businesses.
Unfortunately, this emphasis on world-changing, fast-growing startups have swallowed instances such as that of Theranos, the blood testing startup (formerly appreciated at $9 billion) that has been exposed to be fraudulently generating fictitious results and posing safety risks for people. Former Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes is currently facing criminal charges.
The case of Theranos is actually just a symptom of the very problem: It is essential to see a culture of world-changing products pushes aspiring and present business owners to presume there is just one way to build a business in today’s climate.
Tech giants began with small problems
Many of today’s biggest tech businesses began in modest pursuit of solving an ordinary but straight forward problem within a particular sector.
Take Facebook, the world’s biggest societal media, for example. The platform now boasts billions of users, nevertheless, it commenced as a tool to connect Harvard University students to one another.
Airbnb is another excellent illustration. Airbnb began off as an easy method for people to rent out their spare rooms (or air mattresses) being a stopgap to assist them to pay rent. The worldwide platform now offers bespoke experiences as well as every type of lodging that you could request.
And naturally, nothing says”humble beginnings” like Jeff Bezos selling books online out of this garage. Amazon is now the highest-value company in the world, with products that range from cloud services to smart speakers.
With a lot of the world’s biggest companies starting off by solving a small problem, this message is clear: new startups don’t need to concentrate only on disrupting the entire industry to succeed.
Uncover one little problem and fix it very nicely
Budding business owners ought to start out with an easy dilemma (ideally the one which they have) and discover an easy method to resolve it quite properly. Even if your product only creates an easy method for your clients to save a few minutes per day by eliminating a dull undertaking, there’s a possibility for expansion in the current climate where everybody is fighting for more time daily.
Even the B2B industry has apparently endless potential for services and products that help folks save time, be more productive and drive efficiencies. Aspiring entrepreneurs really need to think about the opportunities within the B2B space over the notoriously difficult B2C environment. For instance, rather than establishing an app whose mission is to help the entire world sleep easier, develop a system that companies can utilize to encourage staff’ sleep patterns, and then proceed from that point.
Use foundational principles to build a strong base
In the event you choose to deny the Silicon Valley Play Book of global disruption, do not forget that you however will need to get a really good obvious vision on your product. Start together using the why, the how, and the what of your product. It is better to start out using a little team of developers for virtually any digital solution, as too many cooks spoil the broth throughout the very first stages of development.
This little team needs to be full of skills, though, and remember that diversity of thought may help build improved products, so it is very great to get folks from other backgrounds on board.
Fundamentally, whatever your vision, you will have the ability to market it to your own team. If a group doesn’t buy into what you’re doing, they’ll fight to have possession of it and bring their own ideas to the table. Once you have this obvious eyesight for your solution and a solid group of experts who have been invested in bringing it into life, then you may place your sights on bringing it to fruition.
Silicon Valley will always have its own place in the startup world, however, it’s essential for new founders to remember that the full tech world will not exist inside of Silicon Valley. In place of aspiring to be another Uber or even Amazon, emerging entrepreneurs should focus on basic but efficient remedies, doing exactly what they understand best.
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Phil Alves
Phil Alves first began his entrepreneurial journey in his teens, when he started and exited a SaaS business in the direct sales space. From there he worked in senior positions in the e-commerce industry before founding DevSquad, a software development consultancy that provides high-performance, agile teams to fast-growing startups, and big enterprises. To date, he has led the build of over 100 software products.
