We all have heard of startups becoming very successful in the business world, all starting from simple school/university projects or otherwise pet project. This being the trend I want to share some insights on the process of pet projects transformation into real life business startups, how this process is done and what are some of the barriers and advantages.
Clear and Attractive Idea
To portray it better the best example would be would be Facebook and how Zuckerberg started it as a small project in Harvard, very simple and interesting to use for the audience that gained traction immediately and was the most used application in the University, soon to become the most used in the world.
But the question remains how did it became so successful. First of all the project had a clear understanding of what it was and what can be done with it. The idea was easy to understand and was able to create a whole new market around it. This being said great startup products must have a clear value proposition (what they want to offer to customers) and gain the users interest. However usually startups forget about the environment and how it can affect the life of a product or startup, which is related directly with the idea.
The Right Environment
Since Facebook was just a small project between friends and the students in the campus, it had few risks and a personal relationship with its environment. The audience being targeted were young people who were tech savy and used Internet extensively. From this we understand that Zuckerberg knew the environment around its new startup, that early users of Facebook were competent to use it and could give valuable insights and feedback about the product usage and its features. Main point the audience targeted was right and easily accessible, furthermore the audience was capable of suggesting new improvements and thus could contribute to the development of the product.
Know When To Back Off
With time passing by, the small campus startup began to increase soon to become one of the biggest social networks on earth. This is a process that all companies need to have although statistics show that majority of the startups fail within a year and very few (5%) survive to have organic growth.
Thus startups need to be "innovative" meaning that they need to respond to threats and opportunities. In the beginning startups have the advantage of being loose and less bureaucratic as they innovate easily and respond to shifting customer demands faster.
However with the growth of the organization, the founders need to allocate work and focus more on main points that can strengthen the company. Lets take again the example of Facebook where Zuckerberg being the Founder & CEO he did not have the capabilities of a leader or a manager, what he was good at was coding and planning. Which is why experienced experts of the tech industry did the management until now, in 2011 Zuckerberg returned to become again the CEO of Facebook. This lets us understand that even if you as a entrepreneur have devoted a great part of your life to develop your startup and manage it, when growth comes and different set of skills is required, you need to step down and reconsider your ability to lead. Zuckerberg left being CEO and went to develop its leadership and management skills. He still was involved in the decision-making and maintenance but his main focus was to prepare to become the face and leader of the big organization. He understood that his presence would stall the growth process and thus he delegated and empowered the adequate and the right persons for that position until he got ready. The same story is valuable for Google Founders too. They all stepped down and learned how to become leaders.
I leave you with an overview of the process of transformation from a university project to a successful growing startup. There are many obstacles that are in this process but these are the main and most stumbled upon. Furthermore I urge you to comment and give an opinion of what might be a problem for your pet project and what are you doing to solve it.
Nothing annoys me more than perfectly capable people building useless crap that nobody needs, justifying it as a learning experiment - when there are desperate and dire needs out in the world, and the people running "the official solutions" are even less qualified than you and me, all in existing markets with problems that can easily be solved, had they only been more visible.
But people don't easily share this market insight, because they think they will keep it for themselves and make money off it. On the other side, people get lots of ideas that they too think they can make money off, but that are stupid ideas and they only find out after they put too much effort into it - if they just told more people about it sooner, they would've been able to fine tune their ideas much sooner.
So I don't buy this nonsense about "creating a market". It's all about recognizing the latent market that is there already - nothing in the world is new. What is important is taking the time to look and dig real deep into the problem you think you see, before you even attempt to formulate a solution. Try to disprove your most basic assumption as early and cheaply as possible.
About Facebook - It's not a good example because it had a lot of things going for it, rich kid, rich school, rich family, good connections - the only relevant thing, perhaps, is that there were many projects like Facebook at the time, so besides connections and money, what set Facebook apart? They shared their API and allowed developers to use their data - something none of the other platforms did back then. In effect, they crowd sourced new ideas from developers the world over, all they did was to create a "standard" around which it was profitable for developers to do so. That's the revolutionary "new" thing they proved worked to gain support, but it's something that people who understand software freedom has known for years. Google did almost the same to become popular. But both of them seem to have forgotten their roots and now have shareholders who likely don't understand any of this milking and strangling them... although Mark Zuckerberg has a trump card in his controlling stake in Facebook... I wonder what he will do with it.
Finding the right environment - completely agree, if you have a real solution and it works and you find the right environment where it can take root, it will start growing... but you need to be the passionate flame burning, heating up that insanely big iron with just your little flame through consistent application.... and "Knowing when to back off" - yes, you should never become a bottleneck to the growth. Find someone who has done it before, who is keen and able, and let them. Usually people who start things are bad at running them, and vice versa... ultimately you need a good, balanced team.
I upvote U