It been a while. I just read a couple of posts on the relative importance of Team, Product and Market that motivated me to write.
Here are the post. The first is from Marc Andreson (Netscape fame) and the second is in response to Marc by Paul Buchheit (Gmail fame). I think both are worth reading.
If I read Marc right he states that the market wins and the product-market fit defines success.
Marc refers to Andy’s (Benchmark) quote
Andy puts it this way:
When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.
Paul reiterated this but claimed that if your product is conducive to fast frequent iteration (web products) a good market will draw out the right product.
Paul says…
For web based products at least, there’s another very powerful technique: release early and iterate. The sooner you can start testing your ideas, the sooner you can start fixing them.
I think they both have good points however I would frame it differently.
When I look at a startup for Tandem Entrepreneurs, I look at the market as a target, the bigger the market the higher the probability of hitting the target. And I look at the team as the archer, the better the archer the more likely that they will hit the target. The product at the start should be at best treated as a guess of where you should aim.
Now having said this I would caveat it with the fact that defining a large market is easy. Defining the right market is an art and it is hard but critical.
The market becomes the focus of the startup and any startup without a focus is hard to execute. So I agree with Marc that the market is very important but it need not be huge. It needs to be big enough and clearly defined.
Once the market is defined and the team understands that the market and not the product is the focus; then begins the job of tuning the product-market fit whiich can be done well by releasing early and often (if your product and market are conducive to this) as Paul suggests.
A thoughtful definition of the market and a good team are critical to success. But I would contend that if you have a good team that understands the importance of the market, they will in the right environment, be able to find a good market – there is no dearth of opportunity.
- Muscle Capital : Delivered - May 22, 2013
- Visiting India - February 6, 2012
- ZumoDrive expanding team in Asia - January 26, 2010
Srinivas,
You are perfectly right in stating market as well as great inventions.
Life is organic……but planners and non-creative people alway want life to be inorganic…planned in certain direction to make it predictable.
lets say google is best in search engine possibilty….but google developers know the fall-back of google search engine…or limitation of google search engine…..anything which is defined has limitation and boundations…..writing big words about anything wo’nt help…….google is simply a classical way of life representing itself….it can’nt be repeated or we should not try to copy life…..coz we all are unique….so does every idea, every market and every product…….unique in its own way.
Virat
Thanks for the links.
The following words from Marc’s blog hit closest to home.
“In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.”
This is why the open source model is going to look very attractive for product startups going forward. More “pull” happens, at an early stage. We can never have enough of this pull, can we ? A download here, a few questions there, a feature request. After a number of these, you start to get closer and closer to the market. For an early stage product company, this is like oxygen. No amount of mentorship, superstar team members, or capital can substitute for this.
I am puzzled and bewildered by some of the arguements here. What is a market? According to me it is a set of all customer needs met and unmet, known and unknown. Market opportunity for business owner is the ability to match a subset of this market through a service or a product.
Greatness is a comparative adjective. There has to be something poor and substandard for the experience to be great. There cannot be great service without poor service both co-exist and both are perceptions of individual customers. Success and failure both are again relative. What is more important is -Is the idea(product/service) sustainable over a period of time? Does it give consistent yield over a longer time period?
I think we all forget the basics reading about great short successes- a long term consistent yield is the true measure of an opportunity encashment. The measure cannot be a short term success.
History tells us that 90% of great inventions are actually examples of serendipity and not examples of desired goal achievements.
Any takers?
Hello! We are a new startup in Bangalore, working on unique social networking model. We are looking for angel funding and mentor.
Any references would be great.
I too have a problem with the “everything clicks” model: great market, great focus, great team.
I am assuming that there is a great market because there is opportunity in almost everything these days; so its all about great team and great team above all else, because a great team or a great entrepreneur (in my books a great entrepreneur is also good because he/she can bring on team) with the right guidance will be able to focus in on the relevant market and subsequently build a great product and a winning marketing plan.