Your Startup Is Going To Sell To Everyone, Even If It Kills You
Use these tactics cautiously. They’ve worked wonders for me. And also gotten me into a lot of trouble.
Most successful entrepreneurs are driven by a single mantra: “I’ve gotta sell more product.”
Taken in the “corporate” context, that sentence can evoke images of faceless companies steamrolling everyone to push a few more units out the door — and into this quarter’s earnings report. But for a smaller startup, selling additional product is more about flexibility than brute force.
Thus, “I’ve gotta sell more product” becomes “I’ve gotta sell a product more people want.”
But that mantra can be just as dangerous.
Riding flexibility until it breaks you
A small company has a lot of disadvantages compared to its bigger and more robust competitors, but one advantage every startup should lean into is flexibility. I’m not telling you any secrets when I bring up the power of a startup to bend to fit the needs of almost any customer, at almost any time, for almost any order.
But there’s a point at which that flexibility is taken too far, and the startup can sink under the weight of its own bloat — the end…
