Do Less, Do It Well, Get Paid

As we are homing in on the final features of Krowde, our new software platform, it occurred to me that doing one thing well as opposed to doing many things not so well makes more and more sense.  We need to do less!  We need to do that one thing we are doing quite well, and we need to prove our business model.  So this is the statement as to where we are at today.  It is not that clear still.

Krowde is a mobile platform for retail business to communicate with their customers.

Explaining Is The Challenge

That said, I have struggled with the most fundamental part of the start-up business process, which is explaining what we are building in one sentence.  That is a real problem.  It is enough of a problem that one of my mentors told me outright if you can’t explain what you got in one sentence then you probably have nothing and should consider quitting now!   While I do agree with him, I am also challenging myself to fix this problem.   And I know I can do it because I am a writer. I also ask mentors and friends to help me solve this problem. They just have to keep patient as I ask them to listen to me, while I ramble on about this stuff.

What Does This Have To Do With Do Less, Do It Well, Get Paid.

Well, what happens to guys like me is we get all excited by the technology.  We love this feature and that feature and this extension and that plugin thing.  Yes, there are a ton of cool things we could do with what we are doing!  Some of that is the endless possibilities of a web app.  But, the fact is that we need to reverse course, choose a micro niche market at first, reduce all our features to the bare minimum and then find out if customers are willing to pay for it.

How Does This Impact What We Do

So as we hammer down to the basic MVP (Minimum Viable Product), we are shedding features that can wait.  We are skipping systems and solutions that are not necessary now.  We are focused on just about getting to market and not all the things we could be doing. So the sentence about what we do; it do needs to be succinct and clear!  That is a challenge when we love to think about the possibilities of the future.  But the future is a long way off.

Get Cold To Tech

I just have one thing I want right now and that is both a working version and 10 customers testing it out.  Thinking is ok, but it all goes on the like to have list.