Allmendinger EnterprisesChoose Your Own Adventure

Plan

A plan is a set of steps to follow to achieve some final goal. If you are able to follow the steps completely and in sequence, then the goal will be achieved. On the surface this seems like a great way to achieve success. It’s absolutely foolproof, right?

Strategy

A strategy is much less definitive than a plan. It focuses entirely on a goal and tactics that can be used to achieve it. Strategic thinking encompasses creating a plan, but takes a larger angle on solving the problem. But less definitive means it won’t be successful, right?

WRONG!

The trouble with blindly following a plan is that circumstances change. No large, real world problem can be solved without something going wrong or changing. Somebody following a plan will be lost and fail when some minor aspect of the plan needs to change, but they don’t know how to change the steps appropriately.

If you just maintain a strategy, then you have the ability to see the problems that may occur and alter your plan accordingly. By maintaining a focus on the final goal, you maintain a fluid path to achievement.

Put into a ridiculous visual example – let’s take parking in a parking lot as an example.

A plan may tell you to park in the 3^rd space on the left every day of the week. In three weeks, you’ll win employee of the year because of your reliability, which is apparently based entirely on your parking ability. This plan is flawless.

A strategy focuses on achieving the employee of the year award. You think this can be achieved by a clever parking strategy. You design a plan to park in the 3^rd space on the left every day of the week. The strategy is ambiguous but the plan is flawless.

Then, something changes. The lot is repaved and repainted. Or maybe, someone parked in your spot one day.

If you’re blindly following a plan with little thought, you’re now lost. You don’t know how to recover from the change. You can’t skip to the next step because it doesn’t make sense and you can’t complete the current step. The plan fails. You’re fucked.

If you’re keen to the strategy, then you improvise when the plan no longer works. You realize that you just need to park in the best spot you can find. As long as your car is in the lot and you get into work then you’re still in the running to win the award. The circumstances change, so you change the plan.

I know it sounds ridiculous. Bear with me for a moment.

Rocky is the big institution in a market. He holds the heavyweight title. Since he already owns his industry, he becomes content in his position. He’s resistant to change and assumes he’s good enough to beat anyone – so he doesn’t concern himself with startup boxers. No need to bother with innovation because he’s already in control.

Glubber Lang is a startup. He’s hungry; he’s fast; he’s agile; he’s kind of a dick; he has a different take on the market. He destroys Rocky in a fight that Rocky didn’t even bother training for seriously.

The beatdown makes Rocky realize he’s lost his edge (thanks to outside consultant Apollo Creed). He then changes his training strategy to be better equipped for the next fight. He maneuvers his position so that Glubber Lang doesn’t have such a huge advantage and effectively bumps Glubber out of the market.

If this isn’t an exact reflection of the internet startup world, then I’m just crazy (also plausible).

After launching my first serious web application (Roster Brain) without the help from any cofounders, I now understand why investors shy away from one man teams. Even on a simple project, it’s an impossibly difficult undertaking.

Even beyond the sheer amount of work that is required, a solo entrepreneur must be capable in so many different aspects of the business. For a simple web project, you have to understand the overall strategy, programming, design, and marketing just to get to launch. This doesn’t even count the ongoing tasks like finance, promotion, or inventory management.

Then, even if you can manage to figure out how to do all of these things yourself, you have to find the time to do them. I think this is the ultimate problem for any project of size. Unless you hire out a lot of the different aspects, it’s just too difficult to complete everything within a reasonable time frame.

When building Roster Brain, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money (mostly because I’m a cheapskate). This meant doing everything on my own. While I have great strengths in strategy and problem solving, I’m not quite as talented at marketing and design.

Everything has turned out decently well anyway, but I believe the project may have launched much more strongly if I had a cofounder or two to compensate for my weaknesses. The trouble is that I haven’t found someone that matches the profile yet and is interested in the same type of projects.

For my next project (which is inevitable and already fairly well defined), I’m not going to be so skimpy on the third party tools I use. There are a lot of cheap or free tools that can help launch a project. If you know the ins and outs of the project before you get too far down the road, I imagine using a few more tools can save some headaches and a ton of time. And if you believe your idea is good enough to make money, why not spend $100 to get it to market sooner?

Some examples of what I’ve been contemplating using for my next project:

• LaunchRock – free tool that allows you to create and host a simple splash page. It gathers email addresses from interested site visitors so you can notify them of launch and encourage them to share on social media. If implemented well, I bet this would be a great tool to find beta testers. Mostly, it lets the search engines get your domain in the index and start the ever important domain age clock.
• Interface themes/templates – You can buy customizable themes and interfaces from several places online. I have been impressed by the choices at ThemeForest. They’re not free, but most are extremely reasonable for what you get.
• Stock photography – It wasn’t necessary for Roster Brain, but imagery is important for most websites. You can struggle to search through thousands of crappy images available for free commercial use or pay a few dollars at a place like iStock and move on to other aspects of the project.