salesI work at a company that has a few products, most of which are in the mature stage. We just released a new product and when trying to gain new business and attention to this product, it feels a lot like its own startup company. Can launching a totally new product have the same feeling as starting a new business?
I use to work at a large software company where a lot of members bragged that the team had a startup mentality. I was told that each product group was able to make their own decisions and there was a drive & excitement in completing tasks and getting features out to customers. At the time, I accepted this as a primer for being in a startup.
Fast forward 10 years where I am running my own startup and I’ve come to realize that the team I was on was very different from being on a startup.
The first major difference is funding. In my previous company, from prior successful products, we had funding to spare which allowed us to hire many project managers, developers, and testers; get the best of equipment; and not have to worry about spending an extra couple of months getting the project out to market. At my current startup, I have to find people that are willing to work for a dream, use their own equipment & offices, and produce results. There’s not a whole lot of flexibility in the schedule to experiment on new technologies or designs.
The second major difference are the support teams. I really didn’t think about how much effort was put into infrastructure at my previous company. I hadn’t really put much thought into who was creating the build systems, setting up web servers, or writing licences. They just magically appeared as we were shipping. At my current startup, I am very much involved with all of that & I don’t have support teams to help out. There’s only the one team and we help out each other, so we’re all involved in this.
The third major difference is pressure to succeed. As @blunders mentioned, if the company fails, it fails. Which means that me & my team are out of a job & we just wasted a year or more of our time and money. However, if the company succeeds, then we all reap the rewards. Very rarely will you get profit sharing in a large corporation, but you almost always do in a startup (in one form or another).
All that said, I do see why the notion of my previous company being a startup was being spread. Startups have the appeal of being flexible & lively while also creating drive to burn the midnight oil in order to succeed. What company wouldn’t want their employees to feel that way about their job?
No, they’re not the same. If the company fails, it fails - if a new product fails in an existing company, the company does not fail.
No, a start-up company typically has very little funding and very few employees working many long hours and “wearing many hats” to create and promote a product. It is highly risky since you don’t know if and when you product will be successful enough to bring in enough money for the company to become stable.
If you are just launching a new product at another company, you likely already have the funding to ensure all the employees are getting paid, are working reasonable hours and that you have a reasonable number of employees working for you. This is because you presumably have other products that are already generating income and profit for the company.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.