Persistence Vs. Zombie Startups
What's a Zombie Startup?
This post was provoked/inspired by Danielle Morrill's post on Zombie Startups but it's also something that's been on my mind for a while. Eric Ries talks about some startups being in the land of the living dead.
This is what people mean when they say: "Zombie Startups", they look like they are alive but in reality they're quite dead. So the startup may be working hard with a lot of activity going on but they're not getting the traction they need.
Basically the point is that their progress is asymptotic with the point of critical mass. It looks like it'll keep getting closer and closer and closer but this is deceptive. The reality is that it'll never get there.
photo credit: leg0fenris via photopin cc
If a startup is a zombie startup then the true cost (as a commenter in the above post points out) are the missed opportunities the people involved in the startups could have taken had they not been tied up on a doomed project. Whilst we all learn from bad experiences the goal is to have a successful startup so the sooner you can drop the duds the better.
I got to hear Google's CFO Patrick Pichette speaking at Fishburners recently and he talked about his job as CFO.
Essentially he said that Googlers like to win, just like everyone else, and that he's fortunate in that most of the time his job is just giving people the facts and they'll usually make the right call.
So if they start a new project at Google and it's not getting traction then he'll just share the metrics and he said 90% of the time they decide to drop that project and join a project that's going gangbusters.
What's implied is that with the right metric tracking and awareness of what other amazing opportunities exist that a rational person will switch from an opportunity with less likelihood of success to an opportunity to a higher likelihood of success.
Premature Pivoting
Now, I love me some lean startup but what gets lost (and I think whatever methodology succeeds lean will exploit this often over-looked trait) is the value of persistence.
To be fair, Danielle makes the point about working on something you really care about but the reality is that no matter how passionate and interested you are in solving a problem you're going to have dark days and long periods of seemingly no progress.
photo credit: Al_HikesAZ via photopin cc
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the relationship between skill and challenge in creating boredom, anxiety or a flow state in his book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Exprience".
Where this is relevant to startups is that the challenge is extremely high and the skill is rarely appears to the founder be sufficient to meet that challenge. So no matter the passion it's natural to have anxiety, lows and periods of doubt.
This partly explains why those of us in the startup world cling to mantras and mythologise the startup journey to work it into the kind of tale that Michael Gerber talks about in the "E-Myth" where it's a small band of diehards taking on the world.
Only by making the battle epic and the prize worthy could any startup founder overcome their anxiety and fear or failure and keep going. It's fundamentally irrational from a biological perspective to keep subjecting yourself to this pain and it makes sense that we would endeavour to find a way to rationalise ourselves out of it.
Seth Godin also discusses the path to mastery in his book "The Dip" where he makes note of the fact that in the acquisition of anything of massive value (including skill, wealth, etc) you have to endure the long and time-consuming chasm between beginner's luck and early joy to seeing powerful results. This plugs in to Malcolm Gladwell's often quoted 10,000 hours of practice rule from his book, "Outliers".
So, what have we got so far?
- If you're not seeing meaningful growth as a startup then the best thing you can do is quit or pivot ASAP.
- Persistence is the most reliable way to guarantee success, even when progress appears non-existent.
- Startup founders will feel anxiety and an urge to quit once the reality of the work ahead sets in.
Based on above
The key to having a successful startup is to know what your true key metrics are, know where you stand with them, to persist regardless of how you feel if those key metrics are where they should be.
Exception to this rule: if your vision is big enough in scope then persist with your vision regardless of metrics but alter your course based on the insights those metrics are giving you.
There's a subtle distinction above but it's one that's worth heeding. One thing we don't count is how many people abandoned an idea that would have succeeded. Why? Because it's impossible to know something like that, it's a hypothetical.
So the safer advice is to pivot because there's no way you can be shown to be wrong if you give this advice. As people rarely hit success the first time then their eventual success can be backward rationalised on a decision to change something as these are easier to identify than decisions not to change as a decision to take no action is assumed by others to by a lack of decision-making through inaction.
What it boils down to
To succeed in anything requires persistence and experimentation. One without the other isn't enough. You can take this on many levels. So perhaps you persist with startups or a type of startups (edtech, mobile, apps, etc) but you consider each new startup an individual experiment in a series of investigations that will ultimately lead to a successful business. So long as each new startup is a direct growth of the lessons of your previous failed startup (and I don't just mean philosophically but literally) then you're both pivoting and persisting.
At some point you will have to slog it out in the wilderness for what will feel like a long time (and with no visible gain) before you see results. If you give up too early and 'pivot' then there's a strong chance you're in a startup lottery where each week you're buying another lottery ticket and hoping to stumble across growth.
From the outside a zombie startup and a startup that succeeds through perseverance will look almost identical. The key is vision and knowing what your key metrics really are.
The only way to tell if you're a zombie startup or not is through a combination of key metrics and wise mentors. Certainly key metrics can detect a zombie startup by themselves in some cases but often a wise mentor will encourage you to keep going despite that. It's like a colour-blind poker player not seeing their chance for a flush whereas a seasoned veteran with full sight can. Wise mentors have a mastery that allows them to see things you don't and it's worth taking advantage of their knowledge.
Final Thought
I'm going to end with one of my favourite quotes:
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
-Calvin Coolidge