These are two things that I think are extremely important when trying to build a team for a startup (of course they are important as well for larger companies).  However with the size of a startup, typically very small, the impact of talent and dedication (in my opinion) is felt a lot more than it would be in a larger organization.

As most of you know (and if you did not already) I work for a startup and we are not short on either talent or dedication.  In the perfect scenario, you try and build the dream team because you know that you are going to be working side by side in the trenches with these people for the foreseeable future, and you want to make sure you have the best damn team you could imagine.  Like I said, I think we have that team at Mixx.  With that being said, there are times where just when I thought we could not have anymore talent and dedication, someone surprises me.  The latest surprise came to me compliments of our CTO (although looking back, it should not have been a surprise, after all he is the overall brains behind the product).

However, even he is subject to surprise me once in awhile.  The latest surprise was something that I would have never been able to pull off (well, simply because I am not an engineer), but he could and he did.  We had a situation recently where we were having some performance issues and it looked as if there was not a simple thing we could turn to to say that is what was causing the issue.  Like he is so inclined to do, Dr. Dzoe jumped right into the log files to see what may be causing the problem.  A little poking and prodding later, and he uncovered something that might be causing the issue.  In typical Dr. Dzoe fashion, he made some tweaks and had a fix ready to go in no time flat.

To me, that was an amazing display of his talent and his dedication.  What I failed to mention is that while this issue unraveled in the office, Dr. Dzoe was absent attending to what I presumed where personal matters, he too needs to take time for himself once in awhile.  Even given the fact that it was after hours, and that he had been out in the afternoon, he still took the time to figure out what was going on and how to make a fix.  Some might say, well of course he did, that is his job.  I would respond by saying, yes it is his job, but it was after hours and a lot of people would have waited until tomorrow to take a look at it.  Not Dr. Dzoe, and that was a great example of how and why talent and dedication is so important to a startup.

Thanks for continuing to amaze me, you work does not go unnoticed (but something tells me you already knew that ) .

Or put another way, are you a vitamin or a pain killer?  The cliches abound, but the basic notion is whether or not your product / company / service (insert whatever pertains to you here) is something that solves a real problem or just adds to the noise.

When sitting down to create a new product, one of the first things to do is to take a look at the market you are trying to serve and ask yourself if what you are about to build solves a problem that that market faces?  If the answer is yes, then you do your market research, determine if there is scale in the market to make serious money and set off on your merry way to building the next greatest thing since sliced bread (obviously I grossly simplified the process, there are more than three steps to building a product, but you get the idea.)  There are certain very high level decision blocks that you traverse, and one of the firsts, if not the first, is to determine whether or not your offering / product /service / company is solving a problem, or just simply giving the potential user something to distract themselves with.

Just because you have determined that you are a need, that does not necessarily mean that you are a stand alone product or company, perhaps you are a nice feature set of a much larger product or offering (Just when you thought you had a solution to a problem and you were off to the races).  So what happens if you are solving a problem and you are a viable stand alone product, does that mean it is a recipe for success?  Nope, not at all.  Perhaps the problem you are solving is not that big enough of a problem that potential users are going to change their current habits and switch to what you are offering (and just when you thought you had it all figured out).  However, with all that being said, you chances are increased if you are solving a problem and you are a viable stand alone product.

There is of course, the flip side to this equation, and we have all seen products / companies that are a nice to have and seem as if they are just a feature of something much larger take off and grow like wildfire even when  all the odds seem to be against them.  Why does that happen?  Sometimes something comes along that does not seem to have much purpose other than wasting time, but even still it captures the users attention and draws them in.  I can think of a few of these, but I will not mention them specifically as I do not want sound like I think they are a waste of time, in fact I use them myself.

So at the end of the day, ask yourself whether or not you are a need or a nice to have?  If you are a need, congrats you are on your way to viability (but remember it is a long road), if you are a want, good luck catching lighting in a bottle.  Good news is you are not the first one to accomplish this feat, nor will you be the last .