ShortestPath™ Training and Guidance
This is part of the powerful commitment to not make early-stage new-ventures a profit-center for anyone in the community. Out of the gate, the first guidance for new-ventures need is the shortest-path to satisfy their 2 most urgent and important needs:
- Validating the idea
- Getting customers
For each new venture this path may be different. Consistently the #1 problem most new ventures has is identifying wasted time and effort and the ability to let go of inefficient ways to meet the two above objectives. The following processes. for example, should be avoided until paid for by a willing customer, or until other less costly measures have been exhausted, or unless other measures are inadequate for the new-venture:
Typical Needless New-Venture Money Pits
Unconditional resource commitment (manpower, funding, equipment, services, etc).
This is does not preclude conditional commitments, which are always strongly encouraged.
Unnecessary Prototypes and/or MVPs, and premature product-building.
This does not preclude proof-of-concepts and well-defined product and customer parameters for research and analysis, which are always essential.
Costly Development Methods
Development heavy validation should be avoided when something like the "onepage-website and test briefly with adwords" method can often suffice.
Poorly-targeted conventional advertising-heavy campaigns
Grassroots campaigns (like working with blogging influencers, and crowdsharing) are often adequate, and in some cases are more productive.
Feature Creep.
This is probably the most frequent mistake when new-ventures take a round-about path to success. Each venture should have a 5-whys master.
ShortestPath™ is a recommended flow that ventures should follow to reach their most critical objectives as efficiently as possible. This is especially critical for VentureStacked™ and VenturePipelined ™ optimized ecosystems.