“Big things have small beginnings.”
Depending on how old you are, this is either a famous line spoken by T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, or by the android David in Prometheus (spoken, of course, as an homage to Lawrence of Arabia).
I was reminded of that quote reading Chikai’s post above. As he notes, when Taylor Swift was starting out, as a country singer, it was probably hard to see that she would one day become the biggest pop star in the world. Okay, maybe the ambition to become a country star isn’t “small,” but it’s decidedly smaller than what she would become.
As Chikai goes on to note, there are similarities to the way Instagram and Snapchat started, with more humble beginnings, before exploding into mega stardom. The same, of course, is true with Facebook, Twitter — in fact, it’s probably true of basically every startup. Certainly the ones that get their start on the web and/or mobile.
This all sounds incredibly obvious. And yet, I can’t tell you how many startups try to begin by “boiling the ocean” — that is, trying to do everything they can because they can. It’s almost always a mistake, of course. (Hard to come up with a time when it’s not.) Not only do you need to focus and all that — but you need to convince a group of early users to become die hard users. And that’s a lot easier to do if you start out “small.”
(Aside: As I write this, I’m remembering that I wrote something very similar on the topic six and a half years ago. And yet, the song remains the same.)
It’s no secret why: it’s human nature to want to do everything you can to succeed, and also to give yourself more optionality to find that success. So you boil that ocean.
At the same time, you may worry that if you start out one way, it will be incredibly hard to change what you are, and grow as a product. That’s absolutely true — people hate change — exacerbated by the fact that as you do grow, while it may not seem like you should, you will undoubtedly have to alter and evolve your product, lest you get left behind and/or blindsided by something else that comes along.
Quite the predicament.
But sometimes, just sometimes, if you can execute on big changes while remaining anchored to your original core, just as Instagram, Snapchat, and even Taylor Swift have, the results can be spectacular.
