Weaving and Bobbing

The real art of the start, to steal a phrase from Guy Kawasaki, is the "weave and bob".

Dick Costolo of Feedburner says, "it's about realizing you are going down a dead end before the other guys do".

Matt Blumberg of ReturnPath has a post up on his personal weblog about the original ReturnPath business plan, email change of address.

Matt and his team weaved and bobbed a lot over the past five years and have built a business that includes a lot more than ECOA.

That's how you have to do it.  I cannot think of many startups that are still executing their original business plan.

Comments

[Ric]

And do VCs take that into account when evaluating pitches?

[Peter]

You better switch up your plan after you loose out to another email solution provider. I must disclose that I am a fan of good mail. They have a stronger management team.

[Mike Orren]

Amen to that, Fred. If anyone had told me a year, or even four months ago, that our first product would be a local music hub, I would have laughed my ass off. (Sometimes I still do.)

Whenever anyone thinking about getting in bed with us has questions about us, I always send them to my old boss and mentor who refers to me as a "broken field runner."

But, in the context of making presentations on a business plan, how do you recommend getting this across to folks? When I try to explain that one of our assets is our flexibility and ability to shift the plan (within the range of the general market assumptions), I generally get a response along the lines of: "Oh, well that must mean you don't really be confident in your business plan, so why should I?"

[Wil Schroter]

I like to think of the business plan as a general destination, not a detailed road map. If you find yourself in front of a mountain, it's best to go around it and change direction - not to try to head right into it!

[Dick Costolo]

Ric and Mike, I have an opinoin about your questions, although I always feel like an idiot offering my perspective on a topic about which I know as little as the next person. In FeedBurner's case, our Vision has always been consistent: there is a dramatic need for a clearinghouse of publisher services in a world in which content is distributed to the edges and no single publisher can manage all the complexity. I can pull up our first pitch from November 2003 and it sounds like that. HOWEVER, the business model zigs when you think it will zag, and the only way to be successful is to innovate and fail quickly so that you can move on and try something else before you waste too much time. Another friend of mine likens it to getting your eyes tested (better like this? or like this?....now like this? or like this?). IF you can stick to your passionate vision and innovate around the vision in order to craft the business, you win. I think you can pitch that to VC's.

[Steve]

I agree that, as the great Andy Payne said to me, "successful staryips are the ones that survive long enough to figure out which ideas are good". But if mission-change is an expected part of the process, then -- again -- the structure of VC investment is broken, or at least harshly skewed against entreprenurs/founders. Whyt? Because when a startup hits a hard place and changes bus plan but needs more capital, presumably the investors do not agree to a step up in valuation -- penalizing entreprenurs/founders for simply doing what is typical.