The Focus Problem: What I've Seen Working with Startups

I work with many founders and startups, and I keep seeing this recurring theme. It shows up in large corporations too, and honestly, it's really hard to control both personally and organizationally.

When you're in those early stages of a startup, there are 2 critical things that I see missed repeatedly by the startups I help.

1. Startup Velocity - The Learning Engine

You want to be releasing a lot, learning a lot, and iterating constantly. Your goal is to learn as quickly as possible what actually works. The truth is, you don't really know what will connect with customers. Sure, you should do the research to de-risk as much as possible, but until it's out there in the real world - you don't really know for sure.

This part? You can totally improve on it through great management and talented people.

2. Product Focus - The Missing Ingredient

Almost all the startups we've worked with were plagued with this one. You know the schtick - the founders are visionaries, they envision so many wonderful futures and want to build them all at once. The team gets stretched thin and ends up building in all these different directions with tons of features.

But what do they lack? They lack the depth and focus required to build truly remarkable products. They burn out quickly because of all the context switches. They spend 50% of their time just putting out fires instead of building.

In this post, I want to focus on #2 - why focus is so incredibly important, and how you can actually achieve it.

"But What If We Need to Try Everything?"

Many would ask, "You just said we don't know so much - so unless we build it all, we won't know for sure what works."

That might sound right, but it's not what I actually meant.

When you go and try to build it all, you're spread thin. Your mental energy is spread thin. You're touching just the very tip of the iceberg without truly going deep into the problem you're solving, which means you're not creating great solutions (even if you did the discovery work and actually know the problems you need to be solving).

Not only that, your engineering team is spread thin too - so you can't really iterate properly on any specific area, as you need to support and iterate on so many things - missing the marks on most of them.

Your product and marketing teams are also stretched to the limit, trying to hit all these different marks, juggling so many tasks and messages - that nothing really sticks. They don't get the time to truly crack what the customer actually wants.

The Hard Solution

Ok, so what's the solution?

Well, it might sound like an easy answer, but in fact it's one of the hardest things you can do as a startup team - don't build most of it. Focus. You need to do the research and decide on the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) you actually believe is the right one. This is called your Product Strategy - it's mostly about what we know and believe to be true, what we are building and most importantly what we're NOT building.

After you have decided on the ICP, you want to understand what their biggest pain point is - what do they really want (that's where interviews, surveys, smoke tests and more come in) and what is the one big thing you can build to solve that pain.

You don't need to solve all pains. You don't need to solve most pains. Your goal is to solve the biggest pain in the best way possible, much better than all the other solutions out there.

Only once you've done that, and you see hints of Product-Market Fit on that one thing, should you start thinking about expansion - what else should we be building next.

In case you've invested and iterated and you don't see positive signals, you pivot. That's totally fine - you're iterating, learning and looking for the right signal to invest all your efforts in.

The Magic of Deep Focus

Allowing everyone to focus and think about only one problem, or a very limited set of problems, lets your team create this deep expertise in the problem space. They start building intuition and actually creating products that make a real impact.

At Product Craft, we work with Seed to Round A startups, and we help founders and teams distill their ideas and create this precious focus.

This process has proven itself over and over, creating immediate impact. We're there "in the trenches" with the team, going through the process, distilling ideas, and then driving the execution (if needed).

If you're also looking for a fractional partner to help you succeed, reach out to us. We'd be very glad to help you find your focus and build something that truly matters. :)

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