Shift to succeed. Actually, that should be ‘shift to survive’ since survival is success for startups.
Course corrections keep a startup afloat and moving forward instead of bobbing in place, or worse, getting up close and personal with rock-bottom. Every entrepreneur and his/her team would of course insist that they’re aware, and unafraid, of making corrections. But like many other good intentions, these could very well get reduced to minor acts of marginal significance (much like a chapter in a book devolving to a blog post to a Twitter tweet to a Facebook status update…).
The reason is that course corrections are hard to do. Even for ‘mere websites’ where you can make a change and publish it right away to your user base, a shift in features or market is not easy to undertake, especially for a startup with limited resources. Things get easier when you’re bigger and have enough revenue to support changes – but when you lack a cash goat, let alone a cow, it may be tempting to think you’d be more damned if you do than if you don’t. And a shift may be needed any time during the first few years, from the time you’re sketching out a business plan until you’ve established a steady and growing revenue stream, and beyond. (Even the big guns have to pay attention to shifting fast enough and hard enough to stay ahead of the competition, and sometimes their problem is that they're too big and set in their ways to move.)
Shifts can represent a narrowing of focus or an expansion, and both can be difficult. For example, even in our early user-trial stage, we’re hearing the need to add more features to just one specific area. It’s great to get this feedback and know what is really needed, but that means a drag-n-drop to trash of most of our plans and a new hunt for resources with specific skills. While it may be a shorter leap from a marketing perspective, development teams usually get seriously frazzled when asked to set aside what they’ve slaved over so far (and got very emotionally attached to) and move to something else, especially if they feel it is unproven. But, there are few guarantees in a startup, and you just have to keep the focus - build what your customers/users want! - and get on with it. For much the same reasons, more established startups may shift by adding whole new offerings that could change the game, not just the way it's played. In a previous post I'd written about Sharpcast and their founder CEO Gibu Thomas as a quintessential entrepreneur. At that time they were just readying their beta which was about auto-sharing and syncing photo albums across different devices, and they'd got plenty of advance praise. As one of their beta testers myself, I really liked their product, but could see a lot of other, more urgent, uses for that functionality. They are sharp people (pardon the pun) and figured out what grabbed their users very quickly, but I can imagine that delivering it, while supporting what they already had out there, was no easy task even with funding. It took some time, but they now have a new offering available in beta, which has already garnered great reviews (see the ReadWriteWeb post here). Looks like they're on to a good thing.
But is all change good? Shouldn't you hold on to your original vision instead of just 'selling out' to what could be a temporary trend? That is why course corrections are hard, you don't just do them - you have analyze and define them first, and as an entrepreneur you do have to ask yourself if your vision can encompass the change or if this is nothing like what you imagined, not in a good way. And when you do figure it out, you still have to sell it to your team, and they may balk, which is a good thing because it will force you to understand and communicate why it is the right thing to do. Shifts can be required in operational areas too (how you host for example), not just product or market strategy, and the more open-minded and alert you are, the more likely you are to see the need for course corrections, though thankfully they're not always large in scope.
Startups = change, and it's best to embrace it and thrive.