If you missed my intro to this series of blog postings, my intention is to “review” the book Rework by reading it chapter by chapter, and reflecting the ideas against my own thoughts, as well as against the past, present and future realities of Fruugo. This second posting will cover the six short sections of the Chapter Takedowns.
Ignore the real world
Most people won’t get the idea of your start-up, as the world is full of pessimism and despair. There will be lots of cynical views all around you – don’t waste your time, the idea won’t make it. That’s what you’ll hear, according to Fried & Hansson (the authors of Rework). They suggest that you should ignore these people – and the “real world” that seems not to be ready to accept your idea. Believe in yourself, and prove the others wrong.
I like this. Trust your potential to make it right – and just get going. Ages ago the scientists “proved” that according to the laws of physics, a bumblebee couldn’t fly (wing size too small). The bumblebees obviously were not aware of these scientific “truths” (neither did they care about them), so they just kept on flying. So should you.
However, I would be careful about not going too far with this wisdom. You can surely ignore the nay-sayers, but you better make sure you add value to real world people.
We at Fruugo have experienced our part of this. “There is no way you can ever be profitable.” “You can already shop from different countries, why would anybody come to you?” “Your commissions are too high.” “You are doomed.” And so on. We can ignore these comments – to some extent. But we certainly are doomed to fail, if we start ignoring the real world. Fruugo wants to simplify real world online shopping in various ways. We must be passionate about adding value to real world consumers and real world retailers – doing that in a dream world is not enough.
Learning from mistakes is overrated
A learning here is: Failure is not a prerequisite for success. You can by-pass the failures and cut some corners to succeed right away. And you can learn better from successes than mistakes.
Well, I guess you can. So, this point is important for anybody, who is planning to fail his first start-up, because that’t the way it’s meant to be. Doesn’t need to happen.
But seriously, I don’t get this as a message in a wider context. I believe that success comes from iterative development and continuous learning. One should have the courage to try different things – some of them work, some fail. These failures can be called mistakes, and one should learn from them. If a company is not ready to make mistakes, it will only do mediocre things, which won’t provide much learning. So the questions really is: what is the route to achieve success? I believe that this route includes a lot of exploring – including right and wrong decisions on the way. And they all teach you something – if you are willing to learn.
Planning is guessing
Spreadsheets won’t take you anywhere – it’s just guess work, and everything will change anyway. Plans will kill all flexibility and improvisation. Do your thinking about the future, but then just go. Pick your next challenge, and see where it takes you. Those are the messages of Rework.
In principle, it is easy to agree with all these statements. If you are running a small business with very few stakeholders and practically no dependencies, you can maintain a great degree of flexibility by following the principle of not planning ahead. On the other hand, this may put you into a reactive mode, where you end up adapting to somebody else’s agenda.
I think that some planning is good for any startup – it gives you and the team a sense of direction, and gives a reference point for decisions making. The plan in itself should be very flexible, and it can’t be allowed to restrict flexibility and creativity. And it will not, if you and your stakeholders understand this.
If your company requires outside financing, potential investors will require some plans in any case. Very few people are willing to put money down for you, if you can’t provide credible scenarios about the future. If having a plan restricts your creativity and agility – well, that’s too bad.
Why grow?
Rework makes the point that there is nothing wrong in being and staying small company. A small business can be very profitable, have satisfied customers and be a good employer. Very true – I agree 100%.
But on the other hand, all businesses are different, and there is nothing wrong in seeking growth either. Fruugo has invested lots of sweat and money into creating something that will bring meaningful benefits to our consumers and partners. We’ve developed solutions to complex challenges, in order to simplify the life of others. But we need the scale to make the euros work. And there are certainly lots of other businesses that need the growth as well. So there are reasons to grow.
But a different questions is: what is the right path to grow. We’ve learned our lessons here. An elephant should be eaten piece-by-piece. We could have (and perhaps should have) come out earlier with a limited scope sub-solution, instead of staffing-up for a full-blown service launch.
Small and simple is beautiful, but growing (wisely) is important too – at least for us.
Workaholism
Rework presents workaholism as the act of working a lot, just for the sake of it. I agree with the writers in concluding that there is nothing noble in this. Working too much for a longer period of time drops productivity, and makes people unhappy. Extra hours usually don’t produce better decisions either – often it would be much wiser to decide quickly, then act, learn, and adjust.
However, sometimes there is little choice. A lean startup only recruits when absolutely necessary, the downside being a hefty workload for many team members. I’m sure some businesses can get away without suffering this, but I can’s see an easy solution for staying small without excessive amounts of work from time to time. I’m happy to take advice on this one. Personally, I can surely improve my habits. No matter how much work there is, being “online” 7/24 is not productive, healthy or wise. Point taken there.
Enough with “entrepreneurs”
The writers of Rework suggest replacing the word entrepreneur with the less-fancy-sounding starter. Okay, maybe this is a language thing, but I can’t see the relevance. But for me, making a start-up fly requires much more that starting stuff. Very rarely does a business fly just based on the original idea. Exploring, listening, innovating, validating, learning, adjusting, fighting, experiencing – they are all verbs that belong to the vocabulary of a start-up. Starting gives you a ticket to jump on-board the journey. Mastering the other words is required for success. (Unless you ignore the real world, that is.)
So that’s it – my short reflections on the six learnings of the Takedowns chapter.
It seems that I pretty much agreed with all the messages, but I did have my small comments and doubts about every one of them. Don’t I get the point of the book? Or do I take the messages too literally? What do you think?
Happy shopping,
Juha Usva, CEO
Anniina discussing the Fruugo solution with a real world person at Kauneus 09 expo.
Tapsa,
About failures vs. exploring – I think I was trying to say the same thing, as what you are pointing out. And I guess, you should learn from any mistake, but you don’t need to be foolish enough to make those big mistakes – if you can avoid it…
About planning – there are so many shades of gray to this. If by planning one means huge spreadsheets looking years ahead, then those certainly involve lots of “guessing” in the case of a startup. On the other hand, if planning means making sure that you know what you stand for, and what are the concrete next steps to get going towards the vision, then I think that that is valuable for any business – regardless of how new or small it is. The investor perspective is just one component in the equation.
I first thought the I would have one post about one issue at the time, but then realised that it would take too long. Then decided that I will cover all sub-topics under one chapter at a time. I’ll see, what makes sense when I do the next ones – maybe I’ll select the ones that resonate most (in my head)
.
-juha.
Juha,
you asked if you take the messages too literally. You don’t. If you would take these literally you wouldn’t disagree with them. And if you would take them too literally you would be blogging about how you will be implementing these learnings at Fruugo.
I liked the book a lot! It was quick reading, it occasionally put my thoughts in flames and elsewhere fostered learnings from past projects.
I fully agree with the “Ignoring the real world” although those cynical people are sometimes half right. Even the 37Signals itself is an evidence of that, they started in web-design consulting and transformed (perhaps unintentionally) to a software product company and made the breakthrough – rest is history. Thereby the cynical people were partly right – the web-design consulting was not the thing that made business blossoming.
As a matter of fact there are very few, if any, success stories that are based on the original business idea of any company. Nevertheless, we all ought to fight the cynicism – even if they are sometimes partly right!
I think you have misunderstood the concept of exploring things, you shouldn’t consider “not working = failed”. I mean that a result of exploration is a finding: something either works or not. As long as you can conclude whether it worked or not, you have done the exploring right – you have a result. There is neither failure nor mistake. A mistake is not to explore. A big mistake is stubbornly execute a plan that is not adjusted with results of explorations. Such mistakes do not improve the likelihood of future success like stated in the book.
Planning is guessing – a plan is piece of guess work even if it was required by an investor. An investor requiring a plan does not improve it’s credibility or probability. Both you and I have been in business where plans have been very accurate – last weeks of quarters very hectic to make the numbers. A start-up is not such an execution platform. Thereby planning is – uuuh – guessing. I don’t have a formula how to satisfy the needs of investors, but if guess work makes them happy then keep on.
The style of the book is somewhat provocative. It invokes similar commenting. Could you limit your further postings to 2 – 3 issues at a time, it’d be a bit easier to fire back comments.