24
Mar

The only question your startup needs to answer: What’s your one thing?

I’ve been founding and running technology startups since 2004.  During that time I’ve had my ups and downs and made my fair share of mistakes.  

Three weeks ago I started my 4th company, Fab.com.  Technically Fab.com is a reincarnation of my 3rd company, fabulis which later was renamed fab.com, but we’ve changed our business model and our market focus dramatically and essentially done a re-start.  (fabulis was a gay-targeted social network while the new Fab.com is a private-sales site for design enthusiasts).  As one of our investors said, “that’s the mother of all pivots!”

I’ve previously written several blog posts (like this one) about the myriad of lessons I’ve learned from building technology startups.

This most recent experience has taught me one huge lesson that I wish I would have learned (or paid more attention to) earlier in my career:

There’s only one question your startup needs to answer:  

What’s your one thing?

What’s the one thing your product will do?

What’s the one thing that your startup will do and do better than everyone else?

What’s the one thing your brand will represent?

What’s the one thing you will do day-in and day-out, to the exclusion of all other things?

The answer to all 4 of those questions should be exactly the same.  And that’s your one thing.

Here’s what I mean by all this.  It is critical that you determine from the very beginning what’s the one thing you want to focus on.  That one thing has to be a specific use-case, a specific problem, a specific function.  But there can only be one thing.  Startups need to be laser focused on solving one particular problem, not many problems.  The more things you are trying to do as a  startup, the more things you will fuck up at the expense of getting your one thing done right.

And, importantly, your users/customers need to be able to easily recognize and grasp what your one thing is, without you having to even tell them.  They need to get your one thing from using your product.  They need to experience your one thing and internalize it for themselves such that you achieve their associating your product and your brand with your one thing.

Warning:  Your one thing cannot be a market, rather it must be a product.  It’s not enough to say, “we’re going to build something in the xyz market and we’ll iterate our way to figuring out the right product.”  That’s not one thing.  That’s many things in one area, which is very, very hard to get right. 

Here are a couple of examples from my own recent history.  In 2008 I founded a company called socialmedian.  We knew our one thing from the beginning:  We wanted to build a product that would help people discover what news to read based on what their social networking contacts were reading.  We iterated like crazy towards that one thing, launching new features weekly as we learned from our users and tried all sorts of stuff, but we always stuck to our one thing.  socialmedian was very successful very quickly and we had a nice outcome with the company.  Fabulis, on the other hand, was founded on the idea that we wanted to build something interesting in the highly attractive gay market, but we didn’t go into it with one thing in mind.  As such, we did too many things, iterating and iterating in search of one thing that might stick, and in the end we never found our one thing.  I painfully recall the news stories that described fabulis as gay yelp + gay facebook + gay groupon + gay foursquare.  Warning!!!  That’s not one thing!

With the new Fab.com, we have a clear one thing.  We will deliver daily design inspirations.  Sure, we’ll try all sorts of stuff to make it work, but we have just one problem we want to solve.

Think about some of the other great companies that have “made it” recently.  They all have one thing they do really really well:

• Twitter:  Share short updates
• Foursquare:  Check-in
• Instagram: Share pretty photos
• Dropbox: Easy cloud storage
• YouTube:  Upload a video
• Groupon:  One great local deal per day
• The original Google:  Algorithmic search
• Linkedin:  professional networking

Facebook is one of the only examples that come to mind of a really successful startup that does more than one thing really well.  Although you could argue that their one thing has always been, “share stuff with the people you know” and they are just iterating on more and better ways to achieve that one thing.

So, as you sit there pondering whether your startup is going to make it or not, I encourage you to think carefully about this one question.  What’s your one thing?  Recognizing it early on is critical.  Write it on the wall.  Repeat it every day.  ”

Our one thing is _____.  We will only do this one thing.  We will not do anything else except this one thing until we have proven that we can do this one thing.

p.s. A bit of irony here.  Last year I actually was also an investor and board member of a company called OneThing.com.  The idea was to create a simple website where people could identify the one thing they are the best at and then meet other people who share the same one thing.  Unfortunately, the one thing team was never able to agree on their one thing.  They floated around to a lot of one things, such as a digg-style voting system for people you’ve worked with (ala honestly.com) and a system where people could identify one thing they wanted to accomplish and meet other people who shared the same one thing ambition.  I think they had about 10 other “one things” they iterated around.  Each on their own could have been interesting businesses but the company ended up failing because they never chose one thing to stick with and focus on at the exclusion of all other things.  Irony of irony for a company called onething.com.

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