These insights from a successful, start-up CEO (Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot) on made me nod in agreement and chuckle: Startups: 10 Things MBA Schools Won't Teach You:
I particularly liked the following points - which I paraphrase:
2. Start-ups need to be clear about what they are not doing.
Everyone
knows that a business plan is an extremely creative piece of literature
that projects lot of results about lots of decisions made in the
future. The purpose of writing business plans to primarily to do lots of
thinking about scenarios so that when you reach a decision cross roads,
some of the factors to be considered might be familiar to the
management team - thereby preventing either paralysis or constantly
switching strategy.
5. Pricing is discovered in the market
ie in customer conference rooms in pre-sales, in project planning meetings with customers, NOT in Excel in the office!
6. "Every time you add a new product or product option a small part of your company dies"
It just becomes messier on virtually every front! Treat product extensions with caution!
7. Marketing is about more than .... the right shade of blue for your logo.
Oh,
the hours that have been spent on colour palettes, the depth of drop
shadowing, the size of the font on the slogan underneath the corporate
logo. It makes me want to pound the table and cry!
