The change (or lack thereof) in investor's interests and attitudes has an impact on entrepreneurs' incentives and ways of doing business and developing a startup. Indeed, the entrepreneurs' mentality has also changed. While the VCs used to be willing to look for the next blockbuster idea as the best way to maxiize the return on their cash, it seems like now they rather build up a portfolio of mildly successfull startups, even if not life changjng. Now VCs want some sort of proven start ups, more late stage companies wanting to grow than early stage products in need of development. That means that entrepreneurs waning to get funding focus on existing ideas and try to improve them rather than change them radically. Who likes a contrarian? It is a hard sell!
This has to bring me into rhe lean start up concept. The idea makes sense and it is rational, both from the investor and the entrepreneur's view. Everyone is bound to lose less money if the product is better tested and if only ideas with relative acceptance get funding. You would think it is a brilliant way to take waste out of the system. Maybe the entrepreneur needs to do an extra bit of cash strapping but that is only meant to be good for future cost discipline. And plus, the best product is one that meets customers' needs right?
But it has preverse impacts. It delays time to market and makes many entrepreneurs give up along the way, many of whom keep parallel jobs and end up losing strength to keep changing the customer's mind. When your proof of concept is based on sales, and you have a truly innovative concept, it is often hard to explain it and customers' don't always see the value. After all, we know early adopters are key to take some products off the ground and those are not the majority of the population.
The other preserve impact of this increasingly difficult proof of concept is that entrepreneur's keep evolving the product until it is more easily marketabke. Naturally customers are always more receptive at a product that has a tangible measured effect in improving their daily lives and they can probably put a value to ut, as long as it is a continuation of the way things are already done.
I myself am part of a project where we have done this. Question remains whether we will ever find out the true revolutionary potential of the original idea. In fact, the need for capital determined that we'd look for more direct ways to monetise the product and kept us away from any real innovative disruption. It is still a really cool product, and it is somewhat of a breakthrough of technology in an industry where it has not been present before, no doubt on that. It is just different, not always for the right reasons, even if (hopefully) for the right outcome. But that won't be the case for every product. If investors want proof, we need to keep looking for it.
We all always wanted proof of concept, but we changed the way in which we considered it accomplished. We used to think a few friends or angels agreeing with us was enough, now we want sales, one day we will want profit before we invest in anything. With customers having to attest for our ideas by putting money on the table, we are shifting risk somewhere else but the sale is harder than ever before if we have a product that changes the way things are done. The Apple case was discussed in B's HBS section case before the launch of iPhone, more than 50pct of people in the class (highly educated customers) thought it was a lousy idea.
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