Why startups should act their age

When an early-stage startup acts like a mature software corporation, progress grinds to a halt. Because the journey towards product-market fit requires high-velocity experimentation, an early-stage startup hindered by a mature business’s ways of working could fail before it gets off the ground. Speed is more important than quality.

Conversely, when a mature product organisation behaves like a startup, with a lackadaisical attitude towards quality and inefficient business operations, it is consumed by technical issues, bugs, tech debt, and HR problems. Quality becomes very important at the expense of speed.

This principle is one of the reasons why it’s so challenging to build a successful startup: what works for you in the early days can be your downfall after you’ve achieved some scale. Similarly, what worked for you at your previous job (at a mature software company) will encumber your new venture. As a result, many startups get stuck in quicksand between product-market fit and scaled success.

The best strategies and ways of working for early-stage companies can lead to chaos and quality problems for mature companies. Similarly, early-stage companies that adopt mature ways of working can move too slowly and burn through runway.
The best strategies and ways of working for early-stage companies can lead to chaos and quality problems for mature companies. Similarly, early-stage companies that adopt mature ways of working can move too slowly and burn through runway.

If your business has yet to find a product-market fit, your primary goal is to find it. During this phase:

After product-market fit, companies must scale their product into their target market. During this phase:

To effectively make decisions, founders and product leaders need awareness of which of these two mindsets to employ. This knowledge is vital when you take advice from consultants and resources like books and blogs: most advice is only relevant before or after product-market fit is found. Applying feedback intended for mature businesses to your small-and-scrappy startup can be a real distraction while applying feedback intended for businesses still searching for product-market fit to a scale-up can lead to an unstructured, chaotic environment. For example, many early-stage companies agonise over technical debt and exhaustive employee onboarding plans when, as important as these things will soon be, they are currently an unnecessary distraction.

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