Ready, Fire, Aim
Posted by Max Dunn Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:35:00 GMT
I was having breakfast with my friend Bill Hyatt the other day, and we were talking about how important it is for startup businesses to have a very narrow focus, but also to be flexible about new opportunities. Bill called this “Ready, Fire, Aim”, which I found amusing.
However, this reminded me of the first business I started, Micro System Designs. I started this business with the idea that it would be cool to write software to backup a hard drive onto floppy disks using a disk auto-loader, because it was such a pain to have to keep changing the disks by hand when backing up a hard drive. I developed the software and got a little bit of interest, so then I needed to duplicate the disks. At that time, the duplication software that worked with an auto-loader cost around $500 and there was no way that I was paying that, so I wrote a duplication program myself.
It then turned out that my backup program wasn’t doing very well, but there was a lot of interest in my duplication program. Voila! I changed directions and had a successful business.
So I do believe that a startup should have a very narrow focus but be willing to change it when a better opportunity presents itself – just like Ready, Fire, Aim.
You should push through with this. Im sure techies like me love the idea. This would also ease backing up files much more and making them quite secure.