Malcolm X said that if you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything and this stands just as true in the world of technology start-ups.

The reality is that most technology start-ups start around cool technology that engineers came up with (even though the stories in retrospective often might say differently). the problem there is that for engineers, the bigger the problem you solve, the better the solution is and engineers just love better solutions.

in the past two weeks i happened to talk to two different start-up CEOs from very different markets (consumer vs. enterprise) who had the same problem, their technology was just too good. this gave them both a lot of different options to pursue on the business side. Each option means different target customer, different marketing and PR avenues and different partners to go to market with.

Every time we got the point of choosing a business strategy, the engineers would feel like their superb technology (that solves everything) will be underutilized and good engineers hate wastefulness so they kept pushing back on the limiting specific use cases and kept pushing towards the mega swiss knife approach.

from a business side, staying passive and letting the market sort through the technology untill it determines what is the best use for your technology is dangerous and expensive.

One of the first things you learn in “infantry 101” (as in army bootcamp)  is that in a small scale group to group confrontation, the initiating side might seem to be at more risk of taking a first hit, but that is almost always the side that suffers less casualties and takes the battle.

The reason that holds true in the technology business side is that it is too expensive from a time and resrouce perspective to not have 3 very well defined strategies to persue at any given moment. those 3 strategies need to be specific enough that they can describe the customer, its problem, the channels to get to this customer and the competition aiming for the same customer. there is always a primary strategy and 2 side ones that are being evaluated. the strategies can change and you should avoid the common mistake of not declaring your strategy in fear of being wrong (you will be wrong).

You will find that once you start having a declared specific strategy, a lot of the lingering questions will become solvable. it is only possible to determine sales, marketing and PR strategies when you know who you are trying to get to (e.g. should i launch on TechCrunch or NYtimes?).

From Malcolm X to boot camps to technology start-ups – you have to know what you stand for, take the iniative and constantly asses your course in order to get to where you want to be instead of waiting and hoping the market will show you the way fast enough before you run out of money.