Useless distractions that will derail your company’s expansion

Grow your company and avoid needless adventures

Everyone can agree that the secret to in the expansion stage is judicious use of growth capital and resources to support your company’s revenue, product and customer growth. Young technology companies survive “crossing the chasm” by focusing their time and energies on the right target segment, the most effective marketing channels to build their market clout, the most efficient sales channels to growth their business, the best product enhancements to keep their competitive advantages in the market (see more on market focus strategy). It is much easier said than done, and at OpenView we are very much aware of the hardwork and devotion it takes for management teams in this stage to succeed. Being as helpful, as supportive and as impactful as possible is the Labs’ raison d’etre, and we work hard everyday to improve ourselves and learn from the best in the market.

In this whole grand scheme, given the little time and constrained resources startups have, not making mistakes is just as important as doing the right thing or doing something well. While we have talked about some major mistakes that startup founders make (in their own words) and some strategies for avoiding those egregious issues, I would like to point out a more insidious category of issues – the “useless distractions” that are obviously harmful but can really derail a company’s growth trajectory.

In a nutshell, these are non-value adding activities that companies get sucked into doing in the normal course of business, most likely because “other folks also do it”, these are “shiny objects” that management teams put efforts into because they appear to give short term benefits or satisfaction. Many companies avoid these distractions totally, and I bet that is part of the secret sauce to their breakthrough growth.

1. Vanity Metrics – it is one thing to be “metric-driven”, but it is another thing to use metrics to measure and self-congratulate on every single business areas. Precious time and resources can be wasted to build metrics measuring and reporting systems that do not move the needle!

2. Paralysis by Analysis – this is related to the previous distractions. Given the easy access to analytical tools and data sources today, many will be tempted to tackle issues with endless analyses, rather than to actually do something about them.

3. Big Deals – I have written about this. Big deals are invariably distracting, and can have adverse effects on the company and product’s growth path.

4. Worrying about the next funding rounds – My colleague Firas Raouf has written plenty about the distractions of the VC funding process.

5. Trying to tackle big competitors before establishing your advantage in your core market – One of the ways companies pick fight with bigger players is through aggressive sloganing and competitive messaging that does not speak to the customers.

6. Building fanciful “platform” features prematurely – It’s fun to be creating platform, but it is also incredibly hard and incredibly resource intensive.

Of course this is just the beginning of a list of such distractions. I welcome comments, feedback and new ideas to add to the list.