Person sitting on edge of cliff looking out
I had the pleasure (and pain) of owning several restaurants. I launched new restaurants, bought franchises, and even designed a few restaurants literally from the ground up. Now I serve the tech industry and see many of the same problems here. For example, where and how the business starts.
If you were to open a restaurant, what are the first things you should focus on?
Figure out the menu
Develop recipes
Develop procedures for making the food
Decide on portion control of ingredients
Design the store room of the ingredients
Find a food vendor
Research the best cookware
Research the best kitchen refrigerator
Research the best kitchen stove
Design the seating arrangement
Hire a professional chef
Hire waitstaff
Understand the market
Find an appropriate location
Hundreds more…
New company to do lists like this one are full of easy and hard questions, and they get so long they feel daunting. You need to get started but where should you put your energy and focus? Easy questions and tasks or hard questions and tasks?
Face painted on wall next to “what now?”
Easy questions can be answered quickly, often with nothing more than a web search. The hard questions, however, are just that: hard. They cannot be easily answered with web searches and require time, effort, and often trials and failures.
Starting a restaurant is the perfect analogy for starting a tech company. Failure rates and reasons are uncannily similar. Instead of chefs and cooks, tech companies have CTOs and software developers. Both restaurant entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs generally start with easy questions and it is understandable why.
Easy questions give us a sense of progress, confidence, and satisfaction. With a long list of things to do, it is hard to resist Googling for answers that make you feel comfortable about launching a business. Quick answers to easy questions can also feed into our passions.
In the case of a restaurant, you may have a huge passion for Thai food and want to share it with the world. In the same way, a tech founder may have a passion for solving a problem or disrupting a market, and getting into the details of the tech can fuel that passion further. Passion and energy are great! But that energy can be spent better elsewhere.
Hand knocking down dominos
If you were to open an amazing steakhouse in a predominantly vegetarian community, will it matter what kitchen equipment you bought? Will your recipes and processes for delivering awesome steak to waiting tables be of any real value? Highly doubtful.
If you were to open a restaurant in a neighborhood populated predominantly by families with children and both parents working, how would that knowledge affect your menu? Your hours of operation? Would you offer delivery or takeout services? Would this information better serve you before you make smaller decisions? Highly likely.
All those conditions will have a ripple effect all the way down to how you prepare your food, how you serve your food, what food you buy, how you store that food, takeout containers, and the list of effects continues on. Yet most still choose the easy questions first. Perhaps because finding answers to easy questions upfront can feel like the right thing to do despite leading to real problems later on.
All the momentum and work you put into chasing easy answers may have set you on the wrong road. It generally gets worse over time. Many entrepreneurs fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy and try to bend rather than change. This only prolongs the pain.
How much more successful would a similar restaurant entrepreneur be if they focused on hard questions like these first: Who are my customers? What do they want to eat? Where is the best location to reach them? How should we market to them? What is the competition like? Is there even an opportunity in that market? Can I find a profitable niche?
These same rules apply to technology startups. Sometimes deciding the tech stack and tools too far ahead puts an organization down the wrong tech path and even the wrong product path. After a few months, or years, you may find your business is stuck and unable to maneuver into the markets or products you need to be competitive.
Small sign with courage
Ask the hard questions first, then let the rest fall into place. Most successful businesses know it is not their products that make them successful, but how well they know their customers and how to reach them. With all the progress technology has made, and the cornucopia of tools available, it is quite rare that a project will fail because the technology could not be built.
A well designed business concept in the hands of an experienced software professional will be worked out. In the same way, a restaurant in the right location and in the hands of a professional chef stands a better chance of success. The key is to stay out of their kitchen and let the chef do what they do best.
Take a few minutes to do the research on why tech startups fail. I did. Almost none of the reasons were that the technology could not be built. The top reasons, both in those results and in my own experience, came down to the business team not answering the hard questions and focusing too much on the easy questions (i.e., the technology).
The bottom line is: Answer the hard questions first, focus on your business concept, target audience, and find a software professional to help turn your idea into reality. Choose someone you can trust, so you can keep focusing on the hard questions, because the answers to hard questions will determine your business success the most.
Sign of “do something great”
