Startups, in general, can be defined as ventures with extremely high level of uncertainty. Add a global pandemic to it, and you get into a situation where it’s impossible to make fixed long-term plans and make decisions that guarantee success. If we’ve always needed to go lean, now we need to go super lean. If we thought we were agile, now it’s the time to be more agile than ever.

Shall we proceed with the business as usual, pivot and minimize damage, or shut it all down and move on? “Move” being very freely interpreted, that is…

Entrepreneurship is not about being a big boss of a big deal company. It’s about recognizing opportunities and solving problems. In the times of crisis, the problems are not something we are lacking right… 

But then again, you might wonder, in the times like these, would there be anyone who can / is willing to afford your solution? However, as long as there are needs, there are goods to be exchanged. In the system like our current, there is a lot of accumulated capital. It could be a chance to use it for some win-wins.

So if you have a product (idea) at any stage (ideation, design, development, live MVP or anything further), you simply need to do like a good entrepreneur always does: the validation of your assumption including the current values of the (more than) ever-changing parameters. 

Which questions do you need to ask?

• Is the problem I’m tackling still relevant? It’s very likely that the problem is still there (not many things got magically resolved by the crises), but with so many new problems that have appeared, it simply might not be anyone’s priority anymore.

• Is my target audience size still the same? Could be that part of your audience found an ad-hoc solution pressured by the crises, another part has way bigger problems to deal with, and probably a part of your audience simply cannot afford your solution anymore.

• Maybe my guys don’t need me anymore, but there are plenty of fish in the sea (that’s kinda bad joke with the oceans being endangered, but I always like to make us think…)? Consider other markets and/or verticals to offer your product to.

• Does my solution bring value to an individual user independently of the total pool of users? If your product is a marketplace, and one side of it has been heavily affected, the other side won’t be able to benefit from the product in the same way. The same goes for all the products that facilitate any kind of communication / transaction / collaboration  between two or more associated users. If the majority of them have a good reason to drop it, it will stop making sense for the others as well. 

• What if I fine tune my monetization strategy? If you are running any kind of buyer & seller platform, it could be that the buyer is no longer into paying the subscription, but the seller finds it worth it to pay for a banner. Maybe it’s just the pricing plans structure that needs to change? A premium feature could become basic or vice verse, a monthly subscription could be replaced with a per-transaction commission? It’s not only what you charge for, but how you charge for it.

• What is my competition doing and how well is it going for them? It’s allowed to take a peak, isn’t it? Do the market re-research.

• Is my solution still valid but the channels (the path to customers) have changed? This is highly likely.  

• What are my top three features? Is there a feature that was scheduled for somewhere down the road that popped up now as one of the top ones? Maybe it’s even already implemented, but needs to be promoted in a different way? 

• Maybe a feature can be a product itself? It could be that by stripping down what doesn’t do the job anymore you can launch / keep live what really matters right now?

• What is unique to me, my capacity and my solution? These are the times when people are losing and gaining overnight, so it could place you in a unique position. To put it simple, if you have an online version of almost about anything, the competitor’s advantage of “hmm, it’s never gonna be as good as the real thing” has simply vanished with the real thing being totally unrealistic for the time being. 

• How long-term my timeline to get profitable was before the crises? If your revenue plan was a long-haul one, it’s gonna get trickier. 

• Where does my investment come from? How did my costs change? Get those accountant glasses on and recalculate. 

Should I stay or should I go?

To proceed or not is actually not a binary one. It could be that you need to proceed even faster cos you have this magical solution that everybody is desperate for right now (ok, maybe not the vaccine, but the next best thing) and you need to get it out while it’s hot, and before your competition does, let’s not forget about them right… (We are all in this together, but the society is still driven by the money, for better or for worse, let’s not go there today.)

It could be that your idea still validates and you still have the means to feed the development – that’s kinda nice… However, it’s advisable to be a bit more conservative about investing your last cent under the circumstances. Slowing the pace might be your strategy. 

Slowing the pace is also a good strategy in order to be super lean and keep on re-validating, measuring, learning, re-prioritizing with minimal iterations. 

Pivot as the way of life

Small scale ventures with extremely high levels of uncertainty, often nicknamed startups, accept pivoting as a viable option to control the damage and re-use the invested resources (money, time, effort, even sanity). If your problem & solution renders as not (that much) needed any more, there is a decent chance that what you already have can be used to offer a solution for a new problem. Re-do the market research and business modelling (the lean canvas etc.), counting your existing resource (could be an actual live product, but it could also be a product in a design phase but still easier to take it from there than start from scratch) as your unfair advantage (“can’t be easily copied or bought”, as referred to in the lean canvas). 

The time to say goodbye

The rule of the game is that not everybody can win. Wouldn’t be fun otherwise right 🙂 Jokes aside, the concept of intrapreneurship, where a single corporation launches various startups within, knowing that most of them will fail, and without them being the classic competition as the investment comes from the same source and that’s also the direction where the profit would eventually go, proves that the idea is to experiment, learn and then decide. Proceed, pivot or kill. The last option being as viable as all the others. 

There is no point in investing further in the solution that is not solving anything anybody is will to pay for (this also goes for the non-profit and charity projects where the actual users / beneficiaries are not being charged, cos in the end somebody does pay for it, a private / state fund or similar). As in life, there is no need to cry cos it’s over, but rather smile cos it happened, and you learned from it. 

How to leverage the gig economy to be super lean and sustain your startup in the times of crisis 

In order to minimize the damage, you need to make the proceed / pivot / kill decision as low-cost & early as possible. 

In order to decide in which direction to pivot, you need to validate your new strategy as low-cost & early as possible. 

In order to proceed with your product development you need to prioritize the features and plan the next release as low-cost & early as possible. 

How do the remote work and the gig economy come into the picture? Here are a couple of points:

• By working remotely (you stay at home and self-isolate, yes) you don’t limit your business to local talent and/or rates. 
• By working remotely, you can scale the team without thinking about the office space etc. 
• By working with freelancers you can scale the workload (pls be fair and notify the freelancers a bit in advance)
• By working with freelancers you can plug’n’play different skillsets as you build – measure – learn (the lean way)
• By working with freelancers, you not only adjust your product roadmap, you adjust the team as the parameters change

All of us, the remote work advocates, have been advocating it as the future of work. What happened is that it has become our present, our reality and is here to stay even when the full-on crisis is over. It’s obvious that we need it, that we need to be ready just in case, but also that there are many benefits to it, even in the times when all is ok. The flexibility of the business in the fast pace globalized world, the quality of life of the individuals, and last but never the least, the sustainability of the environment that is at risk with all those unnecessary commutes. 

The remote work is a way to lead a business or an institution, or at least a part of it (obviously some work needs to be done in person, as the work of the medical experts of course, but each hospital has an accounting or administrative department that can run remotely etc.). 

The remote work enables the global gig economy that, further on, enables the lean approach to providing a solution, whether that is a classic startup or an intrapreneurship mission of a more traditional organization / institution.  

Remote or not, there is no work if we are out of business. That’s why making small steps and re-strategizing how to proceed is crucial in order to keep the flow.

For further reading, some of my blog posts:

• Transition to Remote Work Under Emergency Conditions Caused by COVID-19: INSTANT REMOTE WORK – JUST ADD WATER
• Working with freelancers to always have the right person for the job when you need them: HOW TO BOOST YOUR BUSINESS WITH EXPERTISE ON DEMAND
• Expertise on Demand: EXPERTISE CLOUD — HOW TO RUN YOUR BUSINESS WITH FREELANCERS?