Carleen Hawn, an author of F|R, suggests that startups succeed only by adapting to change. I couldn’t agree more!

She cites Paul Graham in his essay, Ideas for Startups, as saying:

“…[people] assume ideas are like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don’t. I also have a theory about why people think this. They overvalue ideas. They think creating a startup is just a matter of implementing some fabulous initial idea. And since a successful startup is worth millions of dollars, a good idea is therefore a million dollar idea… The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. It would be closer to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is that, in the process of discovering it’s broken, you’ll come up with your real idea.”

I’ve thought about this quite a bit, especially whenever I’m about to get started with a new venture, as is the case again. I’ve never deemed any of my projects or ventures as “unsuccessful.” They may have never reached the tipping point and some never made it past the alpha stage, but unsuccessful is the wrong word. I’ve learned from every single one of those projects.

They say hindsight is 20/20. I agree. It can be the stock market or a new market. As an entrepreneur it is sometimes interesting to reflect on the current market situation and observe how just a few minor changes to that business strategy could have better positioned your startup for success.

I’ll let you all have a peak into my past for a second to see how “close,” relatively speaking, I was if I just adapted to change…

Bandindex.com

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The first web site dedicated to the underground music scene. Started in 1997, BandIndex.com included interviews, reviews, and music samples from over 1000 artists, both mainstream and underground. If only I decided to give artists’ control of their own pages I would have something a bit like… MySpace.

Menuocity.com

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A restaurant portal where students can order food online. I built this in college and started by targeting students at the University of Maryland. Once the company got some traction around campus, and through the local newspapers, we were able to sign deals with the local restaurants to provide this service for a small monthly fee. However, CampusFood was the dominant player in the college market. We saw this and tried to tap into the residential market. We hired a few people in the Northern New Jersey/New York area to meet with restaurant owners. It was quite the tedious process and our conversion rate was quite low. Instead, if we took the direction of targeting large corporations in New York City, like Seamless Web, and focused on delivering a solution that kept track of all the accounting with a simple end of month print out we might have competed in this space.

RSS Reader

I started playing around with RSS in 2003. This was before iGoogle, Bloglines, Google Reader, and probably the reader you are using to consume this blog. When I was working on a strategy for Microsoft I saw how much time I could save if the content came to me. I thought this technology, once better adopted, would change user habits surfing the web. I was right. I spend at least an hour or two every morning reading blogs and groups of posts based on keywords through Google Reader.

99circles

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More social than LinkedIn and more professional than Facebook, 99circles uses trust, instead of degrees of separation, to determine relationship strength. When I started this project back in 2005 social networks had little traction. A year of development had past and I still didn’t think the app was “ready” for the public. I received great feedback during the beta with 1000+ users, but was no match for the already well established social networks–regardless of the new angle I was trying to take. I folded my cards on this one in 2007. Now you have new players on the scene that are platforms to build your own social network like Ning, or aggregate items from existing social networks like FriendFeed or SocialThing.

Conclusion

Of course there is more to adapting than a few minor tweaks. Sometimes it’s a strategic partner with industry contacts, current environment (bandwidth), or just plain know-how. Still, it is important for the startup founders to forage ahead despite minor setbacks and obstacles. The road may change, fork, or pick up 1000 feet to the right (yes, that actually occurs in Mexico just South of the border) on your way to the end goal.

As long as the end goal is still feasible, please… don’t stop driving!