By Claudiu Gamulescu There are three core elements of each startup – team, product, and market
the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose.
2 basic Questions
What correlates the most to success > team, product, or market?
What’s most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?
- The caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the CEO, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them.
- The quality of a startup’s product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it: How easy is the product to use? How feature rich is it? How fast is it? How extensible is it? How polished is it? How many (or rather, how few) bugs does it have?
- The size of a startup’s market is the the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product.
The most important: THE MARKET
a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.
The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along.
The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work.
And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly.
Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success:
The #1 company-killer is lack of market.
- When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
- When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
- When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.
