Jordan Cooper, a bright NYC entrepreneur and investor, just wrote a post called “If you’re building for $1B, is “Focus” a Farce?” He writes:

“I find myself wondering if changes in the product development lifecycle are not giving birth to a new type of non-bootstrapped operation/execution that is more forgiving of experimentation at the expense of focus (think extension of the lean startup methodology).”

Although I know rules are hard to apply to startups, I’m pretty fiercely dogmatic when it comes to the issue of focus.

Prototypes are easier to build today, as are small lifestyle-fueling products. Serious companies are not.

I’m not talking about the situation where someone is dabbling around trying to find the right idea. That’s not building a company. Once you decide to build a company, you need to pick something and push hard on it. You probably will have to iterate and evolve, but you still want to be working on one problem at a time until your position is really solid and people are no longer thinking of you as a startup.

There is a reason why the most over-used startup word in 2010 is “pivot”, and not “diversify”. It is hard enough doing one thing really, really well. You have to carefully choose where you allocate your best resources. Your talent pool of stars is only so deep, whether management, product, design, sales, marketing, etc. I’m not talking about good, solid employees but your stars. They are the ones who make markets.

I’ll also add that startup teams can confuse a large funding round with market validation, and start diversifying too soon. The company raises fat money on a big vision, and now it’s time to go make that vision a reality. After being starved for resources, founders think, now I can hire the talent to do more! I will de-centralize so I’m not a bottleneck! They hire too fast. Management is stretched and of inconsistent skill. The teams get stretched. Quality suffers. Employees and the market get confused. The vision isn’t fully baked and instead of one bet to pivot, you now have multiple. As fast as the money runs out, credibility runs out even faster. I’ve seen it from the inside, and it’s not pretty.

It really doesn’t matter whether you are building a lifestyle business or shooting for the stars. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Focus first.

The other day, Cindy Alvarez (product manager at KISSmetrics and author of a great blog), wrote a post called “Anybody, As Long As It’s Not You” , saying:

“Who should give you feedback on your early-stage product mockups/demo? Anybody, as long as it’s not you. OK, sure, there’s probably an “ideal” audience to show your product to.  But it probably doesn’t matter.”

On Twitter, I commented about the importance of demographics / targeting, and Cindy responded that many products are not very specialized, so anybody’s feedback is a useful first step.  I won’t disagree with her — it *is* a useful first step. Still, I need to bang on a few points.  I touched on this the other day with my thoughts on product-market fit, and find myself hung up on the line “it probably doesn’t matter“.

First, most startups cannot design for ‘everyman”. Instead, you usually have a particular problem (or form of entertainment) in mind, which usually means you have a particular kind of customer in mind, even if broadly defined.  This is especially true with enterprise products (how big? what industry verticals? how high in the organization?), but it applies to a ton of consumer applications as well.

You might be creating a product that the whole world could use, but the reality is that you are going to start with a group of early adopters of one kind or another.  As a startup, your marketing resources are going to be limited so you need to focus your energies, otherwise you will waste time with an ineffective (and possibly expensive) shotgun approach or simply play a “hit and hope” game praying for viral adoption and media buzz. #notgood!

So yes, talk to lots of people, but categorize and filter your feedback based on what kind of people they are.  You are not just testing your product, you are also trying to answer the questions: who are my primary customers? who are my very first customers?

If you can even roughly answer these questions, you can figure out how these people learn about new products and structure your customer acquisition strategies accordingly.  Yes, it all needs to be tested and measured, but you want to pick a smart place to start. #focuswin!

I’ll pick startup examples out of a hat: Stardoll needed to test their product with teenage girls, not 40 year old men.  Smartbear needed programmers, not marketers.  Gilt Group needed fashionable urban women, not midwest farmers. At the start, Facebook cared about college kids not baby boomers. KISSMetrics wants Internet entrepreneurs, not retirees.  Foursquare needs social media geeks and young urbanites.  There are exceptions to all of this, but I bet you find it harder to think of them than the opposite.

As Steve Blank says, “get outside the building” and test your assumptions for success, but do not focus exclusively on product and forget about customer acquisition.  Your need to pivot might come from the problem you are trying to solve OR your product design OR your expected demographic. You need to test all of the above!

PS. where I see demographics being a little less important is usability testing. Yes, you want to test your primary customer, but watching *anyone* get confused as they try to use your software is painfully illuminating.

Final note: I’m not trying to put words in Cindy’s mouth because she *was* just talking about a first step, not ignoring this stuff.  I just felt the need to pound on the topic, perhaps not unlike the apes at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

UPDATE:

I’m interested in gathering other opinions on the topic, posting them here, and seeing if I can’t advance my own thoughts.

• Eric Ries: “my $.02: targeting is something you discover, not something you decide. it’s important, but not if it keeps you in the bldg” and “I’ve literally been the situation of: To customer: “get out of my way, I’m trying to talk to my target market”"
• Jason Cohen of A Smart Bear: “maybe you don’t know the perfect customer, but you can cut out a lot of folks, and that’s important.  It’s a similar argument to listening to feedback from people using the tool for free versus paying for.  With freemium you have many more people using for free than not, and usually that means their feedback overwhelms the others.  But frequently those willing to pay have different needs, and those are in the end the most important ones.”
• Cindy Alvarez’s response, “Wait until your idea makes sense, then start targeting“

In the spirit of transparency, I thought I’d share an anecdote about competition and those little gravitational forces you have to resist as an entrepreneur. About a month after we started Aprizi, a “sorta / kinda” competitive company announced on TechCrunch and has since received a lot of attention among the techie set.

It was hard not to be distracted. This company had put a feature on the front burner that we had put on the back burner (with a different approach to boot), but I could see that some of our goals would be similar. With all the buzz, I had to ask, was I missing something here? Not being visionary enough? Misreading mainstream market tendencies?

Our pseudo-competitor’s design decisions led to a more titillating, even risqué, product that perked curiosity and which I knew would attract press coverage. You combine “money” and a bit of “weird” and the press has a ball (that combination drove much of Second Life’s massive PR coverage).

For a brief moment, I flirted with change, but our beliefs simply differed with their approach. Common sense reasserted itself: it would be crazy to let another startup define our mission. We need to be driven by what our customers need.

As an entrepreneur, you have to resist the pressure for conformity driven by superficial reasons. In this case, I was jealous of the attention (even though it is too early for us anyway!), but put it aside as an irrelevant and unproductive emotion.

A similar problem happens when entrepreneurs start rearranging everything to chase the latest VC bandwagon.

We’re going to watch this company closely and see if its dynamics teach us anything, but we’re going to stay focused on our own mission, our own message, and what customers are teaching us.

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For a great post on competition, check out Why I Don’t Worry About Competition, by Slideshare CEO Rashmi Sinha