Don't Settle - The Path to Greatness for Startup Founders
As a startup founder, you pour your soul into getting your initial product out into the world. So when that first spark of success happens - when people start using and paying for what you've built - the inclination is to breath a sigh of relief. You did it! All those long days and nights have paid off.
But if your ambition stops there, you're settling for a fraction of what your startup could become. The founders who create generational, industry-shaping companies aren't the ones who get complacent after their first taste of success. They're the ones who use that initial toehold as a launching point to completely reimagine their business and create something the world has never seen before.
To illustrate this, let's look at the pivotal moves by two iconic companies - Nintendo and Netflix - that showed this unwavering commitment to continuous disruption rather than settling for an early good product.
The Starting Line, Not The Finish Line: Nintendo
When Nintendo was founded in 1889, there were no delusions of it becoming a world-famous video game company. It was a small Japanese business that produced traditional handmade hanafuda playing cards.
It was an acceptable little business, but nowhere near the type of transcendent cultural impact Nintendo would end up having. That shift began in the 1970s when Nintendo started experimenting with early video games and pivoted into the home video game console market.
Their very first console, the Color TV-Game 6, was incredibly rudimentary. Just a plastic cabinet with a tiny screen and six rigid game variations built-in. It didn't even use cartridges or have a way to add new games. It was functional, sure. But it was barely a stepping stone towards the juggernaut Nintendo would eventually become.
Nintendo didn't view that humble first console as their final form. They consistently exhibited a willingness to completely tear down what they had already built - even when it was selling respectably - and start fresh in pursuit of a bolder, more transformative idea.
This led them down an audacious path of constant pivots and reinvention over the coming decades:
-They doubled down on portability with the groundbreaking Game & Watch series
-They invested in crazy experimental hardware with additions like robot toys
-They revolutionized the home console experience with the Nintendo Entertainment System
With each of these moves, Nintendo smashed through the constraints of their current good-but-not-great products and rebuilt something more imaginative and compelling.
Settling for the Color TV-Game 6 would have just made them a forgotten footnote. Instead, Nintendo is now one of the most influential and iconic game companies that has brought joy to generations of players worldwide. It's a multi-billion dollar cultural empire because they always operated from the mindset of "This successful product is just the starting point towards something even greater."
The Alchemy of Turning Ordinary into Transformative: Netflix
In 1997, the concept of Netflix seemed novel but relatively straightforward - a website where you could order DVDs and have them conveniently delivered to your home rather than having to trek to the video rental store. It was a better mouse trap, but fundamentally operated in the existing paradigm of home video's physical disc-based ecosystem.
For Netflix's first five years, their service offered a nice enhancement and gained some solid early traction. But the company's founders saw an opportunity to pull off something far more disruptive. In 2003, they began experimenting with subscription-based streaming of TV shows and movies directly to people's homes over the internet.
This was light-years beyond rethinking a better way to rent DVDs by mail. It represented a wholesale overhaul of how media distribution and consumption worked. It uprooted all the industry's assumptions around physical discs and storefronts. And it would eventually upend the traditional models of television, cable providers, and movie studios themselves.
To pursue this boldly re-imagined vision wholeheartedly, Netflix had to effectively restart from scratch. They had to overhaul their technical infrastructure, shift to a vastly different business model, and place a massive bet on delivering an experience that had never before existed at that kind of global scale.
The easy path would have been staying the course and incrementally improving their original DVD rental service. Maybe investing more in automated inventory management or instant viewing of rented discs over the internet. A good, but uninspired approach.
Instead, Netflix swung for the fences. They transmuted what was once an ordinary rental service into the catalyst for utterly transforming how we consume media in the 21st century.
And in doing so, they've grown from a niche DVD rental company into a media and entertainment juggernaut worth over $165 billion with nearly 225 million subscribers worldwide. All because instead of being complacent with their first round of success, Netflix saw that accomplishment as an open door to completely rebirth the entire industry.
The Courage to Constantly Reinvent the Wheel
Make no mistake, pivoting so aggressively and rebuilding your core product over and over again takes immense courage. It's psychologically and organizationally difficult to voluntarily walk away from something that's already working. There's safety in that comfort zone. Which is why so many startups and businesses simply opt for small, incremental optimizations rather than continually reimagining things from scratch.
But if you look at the most iconic entrepreneurial success stories, they share that common thread of audacious reinvention and a steadfast unwillingness to settle for a ceiling of being a good-but-not-great company.
The founders of Netflix, Nintendo, and other revolutionary companies possessed a level of vision that wouldn't allow them to remain complacent with their initial accomplishments. Rather than resting on their laurels, they relentlessly pursued the more audacious path to transform entire industries through continual pivots and reimagination.
That's the level of courage and ambition required to create a startup that lasts for generations rather than getting swiftly surpassed by the next wave of upstarts who out-innovate your original business model.
So as a startup founder, don't settle. Use your early wins as validation that you're onto something - but see those initial sparks as only the opening act for the more groundbreaking vision you have yet to reveal. Attack complacency like it's the mortal enemy of realizing your true potential.
As uncomfortable as it may feel, keep rebuilding, reinventing, and reimagining until you manifest the full scale of the transformation you envision. That's the level of grit, determination, and refusal to settle for anything short of greatness that separates the Nintendos, Netflixes, and Apples of the world from the flashes in the pan. Burn your lifeboats and you'll have no choice but to relentlessly march forward towards lasting industry disruption.
26th April 2024