How To Start A Tech Company

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How To Start A Tech Company

This is one of the most exciting eras in tech. Tech stocks are flying, tech startups are transforming the world as we know it, while we watch. Many entrepreneurs are, understandably, excited by the prospect of starting a tech company. Here, we will explain just how to start a tech company.

First, forget the idea that this will be easy. This will involve a lot of hard work, sacrifices and overcoming of obstacles. 

You will need to develop a great piece of technology at a time when competition is fierce. 

Starting a tech company is for the brave. 

If you have it in you, read further. 

Product-Market Fit

Innovation is the heart of technology. It doesn’t matter how brilliantly structured your business is, how beautiful your company logo is, how wonderful and inspiring your mission is. You need a great product. Building a great tech product is the most important thing. 

Greatness is measured by how snugly your product meets the demands of the market. This is known as having product-market fit. Marc Andreesen, the great tech investor, has called product-market fit, “the only thing that matters”.

Andreesen realised that in the tech world, quite obviously, there were success stories, stories of failure, stories of incredible success, stories of abysmal failure and also stories of just-plain-average. Not everybody makes it. Not everybody stinks. Results are mixed.

The second thing he realised was that inasmuch as there was a range of success and failure in tech, there was also a range of quality of teams, products and markets. Some teams are staggeringly talented. Others seem to have patented incompetence. Some products are amazing, others make you wonder how they were not laughed off the white board. And as for markets, some are gargantuan, and filled with life and yet others, just comatose.

Andreesen asked himself what the most important ingredient for success was. If you had only one thing you had to get right, what was it? What was that one thing that linked all the great success stories. The answer was obvious: product-market fit.

By product-market fit, Andreesen meant the coincidence of a great product with a market hungry for that product. It is possible to have a great product and no market. Leonardo da Vinci invented the tank before anyone was really interested in tanks. Having a great product without a great market may make you a visionary, but it does not drive revenues.

Impressive, easy-to-use, feature-rich, highly extensible, polished products alone do nothing for you.

Great products need great markets. When we think of markets, we are talking about the size of the market, how fast it is growing in terms of customers and users.

Now, when starting your amazing tech holding company, the temptation is to say that a great team is what you need. Many tech people instinctively say this. And intuitively, it makes sense: bring the brightest minds together and surely they’ll create the best products? Many engineers will, in turn, say the product is the most important thing in a tech startup. However, the truth is, product-market fit determines a tech company’s success. Having a great team or a great product is nothing without product-market fit. Leonardo da Vinci invented the tanks hundreds of years before one went into mass production. Genius isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Products without markets don’t earn revenue. Product-market fit is the only thing that matters. Get your product-market fit right and you are half ways to success.