HAVE LASER FOCUS

Focus is how you, as a startup, can take on a bigger competitor.

You can have a narrow focus and outdo a competitor by specializing in one particular area. Now choosing that focus is very hard and very scary. I know as an entrepreneur, I often want to try more things or keep more opportunities open because it feels like that’s safer. It's almost like hedging your bets, by having more balls in the air or more chances for revenue to come in or more chances to win the customer. But in fact, it's the opposite of that, I learned that the very hard way.

In one of my companies, Knowledge Venture, I learned that as I continue to narrow the focus, the company did better and better. We did better and better because we could win against that customer base, more successfully, but also by saying no to things that we weren't as good at, the company succeeded more and more. It was a very difficult lesson to learn but a very valuable lesson to learn.

It’s always hard to choose the right focus but what I learned from that experience and others was that if you have a choice between three things that you're choosing between, it's even better to pick an inferior one, than to try and do all three of them. That even the wrong focus is better than being unfocused.

That was something that was very surprising for me to learn, very hard to believe but I really, really feel strongly that having laser focus is the keyway that a start-up with less resources can take on a much better resourced competitor.