Hot Seat

Chapter 3. Deciding on the Dream

What Is Your Company Going to Do?

For some companies, this is obvious. When I created the Robot Turtles board game, it was because it was a product that I, personally, wanted to exist in the world. I talked to potential customers to refine the idea—figure out how many players it should support, what gameplay features to add, and so on—but there was no question what I was making: a board game that was going to teach programming to preschoolers.

Passion projects are easy to get excited about, but entrepreneurs whose innovation DNA is too wrapped up with a single concept can suffer from conceptual inbreeding. The symptoms of this disease vary, but there are common themes:

• They build products for themselves and are deaf to the needs of actual customers.

• They are so committed to their cause that they miss strategic opportunities—changes to the business model, partnership opportunities, and more—that would put their business on better footing.

• They can be hard-pressed to take feedback and act on it, no matter how valuable it may be—they are Prophets of Truth, and like Moses on the mountain, they tend to get annoyed when people start questioning their sacred cows.

We hear a lot about passion startups because they’re common and they make for great stories, but there’s another way. With my first company, Ontela, it was a much more thoughtful affair. For one thing, because it was my first company, I had no idea what I was doing and ...