How not to kill your start-up

I just came across an excellent blog post from a few weeks ago, titled: 10 Principles for not killing your start-up.

While this list is meant for technology start-ups, and we at OpenView Venture Partners invest growth equity into expansion stage software companies, a lot of these principles ring true for what I have seen in our investment portfolio, and other companies at all stages.

You should read the whole post, but three of the principles stand out for me and correlate with recent posts on my blog.

The first two tie in nicely with the OpenView Venture Partners Market Segmentation Forum from earlier this month. They are:

1.. Spot a real problem and concentrate your efforts on solving it. Do not disperse your time among too many concurrent, unrelated pursuits.
2. Identify your target market(s) and collect market feedback early on. Seek to understand your prospects and customers through first-hand observation (how do they currently deal with the problem you are trying to solve?) and continuous inputs.

And then there’s this one:

3. Design and develop a minimum viable solution as fast as possible. A minimum viable solution is anything you can extract a firm commitment from a potential client or investor with.

That is one of the most important Agile development principles, one we advocate with all of our portfolio companies.

At the end of the day, following these principles could be a way to not kill a large public company, as well as a start-up, as well as an expansion stage company.