From idea to market reality: making an elephant surf

This article is thethird of a 6-part seriesthat addresses common growing pains and challenges that startups encounter, and offers advice on how to bypass these hurdles while keeping your team and customers top of mind.

几周前，我向一群拥有早期资助的公司首席执行官介绍了一群。我被要求谈论经营一家超级增长的公司的感觉。站在小组面前，我有一个倒叙的时刻。仅仅两年前，我们是一个大约20个团队，只有少数客户和一项出色的技术。我们面临着面临早期创业公司的所有相同挑战，问题和恐惧。同时，我们被定罪（一种直觉）所驱使，这是一个非常大的东西。在过去的两年中，这种本能已被证明是真实的，因为我们在市场上遇到了破坏性的“波浪”，并被抛弃了相应的超增长。与小组交谈，出现了几个关键问题。我们最初的想法从何而来？我们如何从这个想法转变为捕捉市场验证的波浪？ And how have we been able to continue riding this wave?

The elephant in the room

Sometimes the biggest, most complex problems are sitting right in front of us–the elephant in the room. Steve Jobs said “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”[1] I think it’s actually worse than that. People tend to ignore major pain-points they’ve been living with for a long time; they either get conditioned to compensate for them or create Band-Aid fixes. These are usually the biggest, most complex, and most profitable issues to solve. If you know a particular market space intimately, you’re better positioned to know where to find those elephant problems, and solve for them. Mark Twain famously said, “Write what you know.”Similarly, you should build a company around something you know intimately.

I don’t want to over romanticize the inspiration, the “eureka moment” that pushes an entrepreneur to go all in trying to resolve a problem. Unless you’re extremely lucky or an absolute genius, that moment is usually predicated by years of pursuit, pain, and potentially failed attempts to find a solution. In our case, it was 20 years in the enterprise planning space that inspired Michael Gould to start Anaplan. He saw the elephant in the room that he wanted to solve for and spent four years literally working out of a barn behind his house developing a new architecture.

Assessing the strength of the wave

Next comes testing the disruptive value of your solution–whether or not the market is ready for it. That was entirely our focus in our first year in the market. Until we had paying customers (I’m talking real ones and not friends or companies in our VC portfolio) under contract and referenceable, we didn’t completely know the disruptive value of our product. However, we knew we had found resonance in the market when it became clear that we barely had to explain the problems we were resolving. You know you’ve hit the jackpot when your customers can articulate your value proposition better than you can.

Timing is probably the most important ingredient of disruption. This is where gut instinct and opportunism comes in. Catching a wave of disruption can be a confluence of many factors from product readiness to market readiness to a number of other one-off events. For instance, have there been technological changes that your product takes advantage of and that fuel a compelling before and after story? For Anaplan, it was the move to 64-bit memory; we simply couldn’t have been disruptive until that tipping point. We had a problem that we wanted to solve but the technology wasn’t yet available to solve it. It was truly the determining factor for us catching our wave.

Riding a disruptive wave

在这一点上,是时候桨真的很难d fully catch that wave. This requires scaling fast and staying focused. The challenge? Everyone will have an opinion about your product and yourgo-to-market strategy. Listen to what your customers are really telling you and don’t worry about making business decisions that don’t follow standard patterns. If you’ve got a disruptive product that is solving a massive problem, it probably requires a non-standard go-to-market strategy.

The hardest part may be simply standing and letting the wave take you. Through this process, make sure your rapidly growing company stays myopically focused on keeping the elephant on the wave. Scale your initial team with people (including board and advisors) who embrace your culture and share the size of your vision. Stick even more closely to listening to your true north–your customers. They truly know the actual size and complexity of the problem you are solving. As such, they are critical to keeping you honest about where you are at and where you should take your technology next. In the meantime, enjoy the ride.

[1] Wikiquote. “Steve Jobs.” Accessed November 15, 2014. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs