Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Part 1. IDEA AND VISION

Most people think that the core of a startup is a singular amazing world-changing and earth-shattering idea. It turns out that this idea is almost always completely wrong.

It has often been said that most successful startups started doing something else. In our experience at TechStars, we know that many of the companies that have gone through the program are now working on something very different from their original idea. Some of these are in the same general domain but a completely different application or product area. A surprising number of them are unrecognizable from the description of their business on the original application to TechStars.

When Alex White of Next Big Sound showed up at TechStars he was immediately confronted by a chorus of "We love you but your idea sucks." Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy spent the summer working on some sort of image compositing software before landing on the spectacularly successful RedLaser iPhone app that eBay recently acquired. We aren't even sure we remember what Joe Aigboboh and Jesse Tevelow of J-Squared Media were working on when they showed up at TechStars but we had a feeling they were awesome, which they then demonstrated by launching a series of successful Facebook applications on the heels of Facebook's F8 launch. Each of them landed in very interesting but unpredictable places.

Startups are about testing theories and quickly pivoting based on feedback and data. Only through hundreds of small—and sometimes ...