Startups by their very nature are expected to be innovating, bleeding all over the proverbial edge. And for sure, every startup has a green field/blank slate (insert favorite metaphor) and you can be truly different in all areas - product, service, even organization and management.
In the early days there's the heady rush of creating, the willingness to entertain all ideas even if they're spacey and could go the way of poor Pluto, and everything, even mundane decisions like ordering food for late-night sessions, are considered afresh and optimized. And when it comes to the product, the team's wallowing in research, brain-storming, asking the experts (even if it only your PhD candidate buddies in the local university), seeking customer feedback like it is the wisdom of gurus - freshness is so much the norm that you don't even have to think about it.
Unfortunately the patina of 'legacy' comes on quicker than one would like. The moment you have your 30-second pitch and your first 10-slide PowerPoint preso, you think you've got it all figured out. The moment you finish your prototype, it seems simpler to build on what you already have, even if you'd planned it as a temporary artifact to be scrapped when you start building V1.0. You think you've got the innovation part done and now you can start building.
And to be pragmatic, that's exactly what you should do to avoid the dreaded analysis paralysis or all ideas, no artifacts syndrome. But, but, but....you have to figure out a way to keep it fresh, have a window open to new ideas, new technologies, new input, just new slants to thinking, to make sure your product and company are not getting too rigid too soon. This is not easy to do, especially in an early stage startup when you're juggling so many different priorities with so few resources. But my personal bias is that freshness is one of the key characteristics of a startup and it is much easier to make it part of the culture there. As mentioned earlier, in the early days fresh thinking is pretty much a given - the challenge is making it a conscious practice in order to make sure that it doesn't dissipate with every checked milestone.
There may be no one way to do this, and to be effective, it is best to be open to input from non-typical sources. I recently attended a workshop at Stanford on a subject that was in the general space of the venture I'm pursuing, but didn't come anywhere close - but I found it made me think along very different lines and I was able to translate it to a new, richer perspective of the product offering. I am not sure how much of it I will use and when, but the whole experience was worth it just for expanding my thinking. And at the other end of the experience spectrum, a casual conversation with someone I barely knew at a networking event sparked an idea for a cool new feature.
I really hope to keep the innovation going and keep pushing the 'best if used by' date out further in all that I do, and to help me in this, have started reading a couple of books on the subject in my so-called spare time (results in a future post). I remember, when I first saw Apple's 'THINK DIFFERENT' plastered on the side of their corporate headquarters a few years ago, I found it faintly irritating as I felt it should be 'Think Differently' . But there's no denying Steve Jobs (and whoever came up with the phrase) is a genius. It took only a couple of drive-bys for me to get past the constraints of grammar and realize that the meaning is the message, and brilliantly so - a message worth remembering in the pursuit of freshness.
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