Let the right motivations drive you

I had a meeting today with another startup founder. We also met last week the day after Wikia launched Evolution; which came very close to what I’ve been working on in these last few months (see this post). I discussed a partnership and how our startups would complement each other. What it came down to is that we would open up our databases to one another and share our technology. I was thinking about doing this with a series of partners. Create a network where if one startup was successful it would lift the others along. The days I thought about it, it seemed like a great idea.

In our conversation he said that it looked like now Wikia Evolution has launched I was going for a defensive strategy. Straight away I thought “Let me listen carefully, because I have the feeling he’s right.” The more I started thinking about it, the more I realized that my “great idea” had the wrong motives.  There was a valuable lesson I needed to learn from this: Looking at a strategy objectively it might be the best one but to truly judge it, you have to look at your underlying motives.

If you’re the one creating your startups strategy it’s important to let the right motivations drive you not the wrong ones. Plus! Never stop asking for feedback.

So what’s next?

A full blown offensive strategy that I will write about soon.

A short startup update:

It looks like the Firefox extension we’re developing gets new bugs with each feature we add. However we’re working hard to get rid of all of them so I can present the whole idea plus a private alpha version within the timespan of a few weeks. Anyone who is interested in participating in the private alpha can email me (the address is in the side column) or send me a message with your email address on Twitter.

August 12, 2008 | Filed Under Mini Essays, Startup Updates | Comments