Stop doing work for the sake of it

The liberating things about startup culture is *not* having to stuff because that's the way its been done before

In 1995, Clayton Christensen coined the theory of disruptive innovation in Harvard Business Review. Every time we use the phrase ‘disruptor’ now in the business sense, it stems back to that article.

In it, Clay describes the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’, which describes why it’s inherently difficult for big businesses to innovate. It’s logical why this happens. If you’re a big business, you want to keep your profitable big customers happy. That means creating incremental gains for those segments. The inverse is you ignore small segments.

It created a playbook for startups to focus on tiny segments, overservice them and then grow those into big segments. Many of the biggest companies in the world today started by focusing on small segments that established businesses of the time would have ignored.

This is a powerful and liberating thing when company building.

It also creates a default different position to the established order. If established order is doing X, you’d be best suited by doing Y.

13 years after the coining of disruptive innovation, Eric Ries coined the concept of the lean startup.

The core premise of Lean Startup is to build your company through testing. Launching the lightest touch, most embarrassing, least complete version of your product there is: the minimum viable product (MVP).

Clay gave us the theory. He told us that big business is disincentivised to focus on small niche problems, and that you conversely become very big by focusing on those small niche problems. But for many it was just theory. The 2000s tech boom reduced cost of entry of building many businesses to zero. A reality for which Lean Startup created the playbook.

Two years after Lean Startup was first coined, The Social Network became a blockbuster success, and ‘startup culture’ became a thing.

By 2012, Paul Graham wrote the infamous Startup = Growth essay reminding people that starts weren’t just small versions of big businesses. They were businesses defined by their ability to grow at an extraordinary route.

Startups – and new businesses – became liberated to do things differently

This new wave of running a business wasn’t just about technology. But throughout the 2010s, the technology weighting on the S&P500 went from a 90s low of 3% to nearly a third of value. As it did this, every other business in the world took note.

Suddenly everyone was a startup. Everyone wanted to work in startups. Every established business wanted to know how it could behave more like a startup.

In my mind the beauty of startups lies in those ideas of Clay Christensen and Eric Ries. It’s the liberation of how to think about customer, product, and company-building. It resets the expectation of what the rulebook should be.

That’s one of the things that makes startups exciting places to work. You’re given a problem with no known way of solving it.

There are natural opposites between startups or this new wave of challenger business, and traditional businesses.

Establishment won’t release a product until its perfect. Challengers/startups releases products early, often and broken.

Establishment ignores the smaller less profitable customer cohorts. Challengers/startups focus on those exact cohorts.

Establishment borrows marketing, sales, operational, management playbook from global corporations. Challengers/startups works out what’s right for them.

Establishment makes slow, long-term decisions. Challengers/startups moves quickly and nimbly based on data from today.

Establishment wins by reinforcing its position as status quo. Challengers/startups wins by playing a different game.

Stop following the status quo

This month, we’ve been running a new experiment with one of our clients Mother Root. The experiment in question is turning off Amazon as a sales and marketing channel for the brand.

By every self-reported metric on Amazon, it was going brilliantly. The brand had become the number one in the category.

But we had a central hypothesis – based on a handful of data insights over the last six months – that it wasn’t an incremental sales channel. We’ll be sharing a full case study of this in coming weeks once its concluded.

In the meantime, founder Bethan had been describing the journey on LinkedIn.

What amazed me was the empty platitudes that were rolled out in response to it. “Amazon is great for LTV”, “Amazon customers do X”, “Amazon has better retention”, “You will lose those customers if you turn off Amazon.”

In short, there was a lot of disbelief and status quo thinking about how you have to run a brand.

This felt like a huge divergence away from the startup culture I’ve recognised throughout the 2010s.

Startup/challenger is about having an empty playbook and building in a way that works for you. It’s about being liberated from the confines of there being one orthodoxy and one way to build.

What day-to-day work can you scrap?

Here’s a challenge for you.

Draw up a list of everything your business does: from ops to engineering, from customer service to OKR planning. And put a cross down everything you don’t experiment on. I.e. everything that you consider de facto essential to running a business.

Now spend an hour exploring whether that stuff is important or not. And really challenge yourself.

Think that same-day customer service is essential? Have you tested it? What about a slick unboxing experience that costs you a lot in COGS. Have you tested that?

At Wine List we defaulted early on to offering free postage. In the heavy physical world of wine that’s ridiculous. But we did because it’s what we believed an ecommerce business had to do. We also believed we had to answer customer service within minutes preferably. Again, orthodoxy.

Eventually we experimented with these things and realise they weren’t essential at all. That human time we saved from not dropping everything to answer CS became vital for our business.

I promise you there is something you can drop, adjust or redefine that can save you time. As a challenger/startup, there aren’t many times in your company life you’ll be able to do this. Here was my list from LinkedIn that might provide you with a starter for six.

What’s on your stack that you can drop?