Many people tell me that they have a great idea and that as soon as they get enough customers they will be profitable. That may be true for any startup. But something else makes a startup successful. And that is all about the search.
Steve Blank, the famed entrepreneur and author of the The Startup Handbook, has a great line in this video of his talk on the democratization of entrepreneurship. He says, "A startup is a temporary organization used to search for a scalable and repeatable business model." This now-famous Steve Blank aphorism should be taken down on paper, blown up into a poster print, and put on every wall of your garage, if you are building a startup.
Watch his talk below, and then:
1. Think about the difference between an established business model and the "search" for one.
2. Think about the low cost of finding that business model.
3. Weigh in here with your thoughts on what is challenging about this, what works here, and what does not work. We are listening.
What makes this so important right now is an idea brought forward by Carlota Perez in her book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It seems that globally we are in a moment of massive disruption. Financial markets, entrepreneurs, and established companies are in the search for business models.
We are trying to make some of this easier for entrepreneurs with Microsoft BizSpark's program to give free cloud hosting (in some cases) and free software licenses (in all cases).