{"id":368,"date":"2020-01-13T11:40:44","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T03:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.dotprojects.com.sg\/?p=368"},"modified":"2020-12-20T14:10:43","modified_gmt":"2020-12-20T06:10:43","slug":"the-start-up-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/2020\/01\/13\/the-start-up-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"The Start-Up Journey.."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cA good product\nidea and a strong technical team are not a guarantee of a sustainable business.\nOne should not ignore the business process and issues of a company because it\nis not their job. It can eventually deprive them from any future in that\ncompany<\/em>.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source : Dijiwan\u2019s\nLeadership (Failed Startup)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

: 90% of Start-ups Fail\n(Forbes) 2015<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201c….\nOrganizations that understand the link between projects and strategy and has a\nculture that supports project management \u2026 can help ensure project success\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: Gig Economy,\nSuccess in Disruptive Times<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PMI Pulse of the Profession\n2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur senior\nleadership team recognizes that great project management delivers against\nstrategy\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: Lisa Glatch<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chief Strategic\nDevelopment Officer, CH2M HILL<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does the above sound familiar? 90% of start-ups fail, and not because they did not have vision, a great product nor the right passion to drive them towards the path of success. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It typically starts out like this.. Founders have a great\nidea, the next great thing it would seem, they set-up and they go about their\npassion towards their holy grail. The CEO focuses on business, leadership,\nsales and creating a market demand as they begin their Proof of Concept (POC)\nstage, the CPO creates the product based on the founders\u2019 vision. They start\nout at someone\u2019s garage or in a basement somewhere. They\u2019re good at what they\ndo, the CEO drives demand, sells, talks to the market, the CPO tinkers,\nexplores, programs and builds. Soon, the angel investors come calling. The\ncompany secures their first SEED investment and they carry on driving the\nproduct to market fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9 months later, they fold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It doesn\u2019t make sense. What went wrong? Well, as Dijiwan\nleadership team would attest to, product + vision most often do not make the\nmagic formula needed for a successful start-up endeavour. What is key and equally\nimportant are the business processes \/ systems, the glue that bring the product\nto market fit in a reasonably structured and controlled manner. \u2018Build the\nfeatures and they will come\u2019 \u2013 seems to be the rallying cry at each startup\u2019s\nenclave \u2013 well, seems not mate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roll back a bit to when the start-up receives SEED funding,\na couple of hundred grand in the coffers, time to break out the champagne! The\nfounders believe that soon, SEED becomes Series A, and more zero\u2019s come into\nthe equation. They carry on doing what they did up till then : the CEO sells,\ncreates markets, tells the CPO the features needed, and the CPO builds. Hiring\nstarts, programmers, technical analysts, data scientists, marketing sales staff\nall line the payroll. Soon, the burn rate balloons but it\u2019s alright \u2013 Series A\nfixes it right? The founding team believes that to paper over the growingly\ninsane costs, they just need to keep building in features, and purportedly\ncharge the market a price which correspondingly increases as a function of the\nnumber of features in the product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward a few months later, first product ships, but..\nhang on a minute.. the lights are on but no one seems to be home. Customers are\nnot exactly flying off their chairs to use the product. Some even say that they\nmight not deploy the product even if it was given for free! The investors get\nnervous.. the downward spiral starts..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Source : Journal of Empirical Entrepreneurship \u2013 Dissecting start-up failure rates by stages \u2013 Sebastien Quintero, 8 Nov 2017 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interestingly, as can be seen above, the highest failure\nrates for start-ups actually happen from SEED to Series A. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This could be due to many reasons, but a singular one that seems glaringly obvious is that many Start-Ups fail to go beyond SEED investment because they lack operational and project management skill-sets, or rather they lack focus on these areas. If they reached a successful POC, their thoughts would hinge on the fact that what they did so far was right and they needed to keep on doing what they were doing to plough on. This couldn\u2019t be further from the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine if u will, a clear starting point from SEED to a\nclear ending point of Series A (or at least, Series A ready state). Throw in\nthe fact that in between these 2 milestones, there will be a lot of pivoting\/change\nmanagement, resource management, risk management, planning, scope\ndetermination, time and cost considerations and you have at the very basic\ncore, a project. Once you dissect that, you then realise why failure rates are\nexceptionally high from SEED to Series A, i.e. CEOs and CPOs are typically not\ngenetically manufactured to look at managing projects, cutting off scope creep,\nhearing beyond what the MVP should have, learning to ignore the \u2018wish list\u2019\nthat many clients would want etc. These are the areas that least interest or\nconcern them..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hence, the one most overlooked area and skill-set crucial in\nthe start-ups journey, i.e. strong and excellent project \/ operations\nmanagement skills are sadly lacking or to put it bluntly, non-existent in most\nstart-ups at the SEED stage. A typical conversation amongst would-be founders\nwould be :-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHey, let\u2019s go\nbuild the next best thing, I just know there will be a market for this product,\nit will disrupt the entire thingamajig industry, we could capture the local\nmarket first and then expand\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYep, I know\nhow to build it, we will put in all the features we can think of, you sync with\nthe customers and the team of programmers we hire will get it done\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Project\nManagement? Nope \u2013 NADA.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many investors, when queried about the above, acknowledge the\nissue, but explain that as SEED investors they typically do not get involved\nwith the running of the operations or management of the company, they hedge\ntheir bets by placing quite a few, making up for uncertainty with sheer\nnumbers, i.e. increasing their hit rate by force-feeding quantities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solution – extract out key project management practices, adopt an agile framework to maintain Business-As-Usual (BAU) for the start-up while ensuring JUST ENOUGH layer of governance, planning, control is in place to drive the start-up to Series A. Supplementing this with key project management experience with practical know-how to balance governance vs creativity. This period is typically 6-9 months, but what an important period in a start-ups journey. Find out how DotProjects can support start-ups in their journey here<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA good product idea and a strong technical team are not a guarantee of a sustainable business. One should not ignore the business process and issues of a company because it is not their job. It can eventually deprive them from any future in that company.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[18,23,22,21],"class_list":["post-368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pmreal","tag-dotprojects","tag-governance","tag-startup-failures","tag-startup-project-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":388,"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions\/388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backup2.dotprojects.com.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}