Secret Sauce to successfully Starting-up: A Playbook

Bait. This title was a click-bait. What, you really think there is a playbook for making successful startups? ROFL. But alright, alright. Since you are already here, I won’t let you go back empty-handed :) 

I am Arshdeep Taneja, a sophomore engineering student at BITS Pilani, and as much as I wish I could trick you into believing otherwise, I’m not a successful startup founder yet. Nevertheless, I’ve been making attempts to start up since my high school days and here are a few things that I’ve learnt. 

Warning: The following are opinions I have either formed or acquired. You might find them prickly, but just give it a shot. 

The Silicon Valley Formula isn’t Sustainable. 

If you are into startups, you know the fad. Founders drool over raising funds, not by the thousands but in millions of dollars, bubbling up their market valuation beyond what they can realize. The abundance of Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors has made such mammoth investments a common staple. In fact, so much that many amateur founders don’t even know why they are raising money. They’re just raising because everyone else is. 

Furthermore, metrics such as “burn-rate” have normalized the act of dumping money to get traction, hardly thinking about sustainable profits, margins, or revenue. Recollect how the big guys of today (Uber, Zomato, etc.) were once burning millions of dollars to grow fast. The result is a generation of startup founders who believe growth can be “bought” like a commodity, and any product can be marketed with enough funds. And profits, do hell with it. 

All startup founders are trying to monopolise their niches, not realizing how fragile this idea is. If you’re actually in the game of making businesses, you gotta be nimble. Start low, and prioritise sustainability from Day 0. Forget the fad and remember that “Revenue” and “Profit” are still, and will always be the strongest metrics. 

Pulling a Steve Jobs Doesn’t work. 

Hands down, I worship Steve Jobs like most of you do. My Jobs fan club checklist is almost complete and yes, I have read his biography by Walter Isaacson. But there’s a catch. 

Like most of Jobs’ fans, I too once believed that perfectionism is gold dust. His attention to detail was the most mesmerizing of all his traits. And like most of his fans, I too tried to impersonate this trait, not realizing how destructive it could be.

We often ignore the context. Apple’s niches were actually the riches. They wanted to appeal to the people who could afford a $499 iPhone in 2007. A smooth, seamless aluminium frame with perfectly rounded corners was actually a priority for such a brand. But this is not true for most businesses. 

Perfectionism comes at a cost, and most of us are in the business of affordable commodities. Hence, for most businesses (and startups), done is better than perfect. This doesn’t mean I vouch for bad quality products. Nope. As creators, we must always push towards greatness. But the leap towards perfectionism might mean a compromise on speed, budget, and time. And none of these grows on trees. 

Your Love Hurts So Good. 

Humans have a tendency to love their own creations. Kids love their drawings, parents love their kids. They don’t realize how terrible their creations are, or more like they don’t want to. To make things worse, we often get hooked onto the first idea we get. It’s called the Anchoring Effect, an infamous cognitive bias. 

And once we have this idea in our head, we commit another sin, the Confirmation Bias. We keep on ignoring criticisms and fallacies found in our original idea and only absorb the things that confirm that our idea is good. In other words, we simply try to validate our own insecurities. 

I know it’s easier to preach, and I myself have a hard time accepting criticism on the ideas that I love. But believe me, learning to tackle these biases is the equivalent of attaining Moksha in the start-up field (yeah I’m a bathroom philosopher).

Lastly: No Purpose, No Point. 

From Gautam Buddha to Simon Sinek, the famous author of the book “Start with Why”, they’ve all highlighted the importance of this three-letter, single-syllable word, why. Both in life and in a startup, having a clearly defined purpose is of utmost importance. And while most of us know this, we still get caught in the glittery glory of our million-dollar, sorry, our billion-dollar idea. 

Unfortunately, most of us get tempted to visualize an idea first, figure out how we can make it, and then if some dreaded soul pokes in our dream and asks us why one should buy it, we just come up with a use case and be like “See, it solves a problem.” I remember how I have come up with so many beautiful ideas only to realize how they are good for nothing. 

You gotta understand and reiterate to yourself every time you sit down with a business canvas that the “idea” must have a purpose. It need not solve a problem as most people preach, it can simply add value to a user’s life. But only as long as it is valuable, the startup has a purpose. And only as long as this is true, you have a reason to put your skin in the game. So start with a reason to startup, the what and the how will follow. 

I’ll let someone else summarize what I meant here, 

“We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?” - Steve Jobs 

Bonus: Since you’ve come this far, here’s a little secret you deserve to know. Most people believe startups are all about taking risks. They are fools. Entrepreneurs and stunt people aren’t the same. As a founder, our task is to minimize risk, not to maximize it. Cheers. 

Arshdeep Taneja 

BITS Pilani ('19 Graduate, Mech Pilani)