DreamSimplicity interviews Sean Murphy on the SKMurphy, Inc. startup stages model: formation, open for business, early customers, finding a niche, and scaling up.
DreamSimplicity Interviews Sean Murphy
I was recently interviewed by Floyd Tucker of DreamSimplicity Marketplace and the interview can be seen below and on DreamSimplicity.com. We talk about how even though each startup team is unique, they have a common set of milestones they have to achieve to move from idea to revenue. We also chat briefly about the Bootstrapper Breakfast.
Some Key Takeaways
- The neat thing about early stage startups is that everyone is really customer-facing. It’s a small boat, there’s no place to hide. And for that reason, you are more able to take risks to get somewhere. You can’t stay where you are: you’ve got to move forward.
- Big companies can solve harder problems in some sense, but they’re typically more constrained by politics and by other kinds of challenges. Small firms tend to be more innovative and more energetic.
- Initial problem is trying to solve three equations, three unknowns:
- Are you talking to the right people?
- Do you have the right features?
- Do those features translate into benefits that are going to be useful to them?
- Scaling up is a hard problem for a lot of founders. Because most people don’t go to startups to create processes and establish structures. They go to startups to make their own rules and to improvise new solutions. So the challenge is really the transition from the heroic to the routine.
- Another challenge in transitioning to scaling mode is that the people who do well in the early stages of a startup tend to be generalists. To prosper, to scale up, you’ve actually got to hire specialists that are good in a particular position. Scaling up requires more process and the need to hire specialists. Things become more lucrative, but they’re not as fun.
About DreamSimplicity
Headquartered in San Francisco, DreamSimplicity has been conducting video interviews for public and private companies since 2008, producing high-quality executive interviews, customer testimonials and conference coverage videos. DreamSimplicity interviews offer SaaS and Sales 2.0 clients a platform to discuss their recent news announcements, and gather greater social buzz for their corporate story through a number of innovative web video outlets.
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Update July 22: A transcript for this interview is now available.
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Sean, your views are quite helpful for any serious entrepreneurs.
Your quotes on twitter are right-on-the-dot. They help in validating some of my business opinions.
Thanks.