What it takes to be a “nimble” startup?

I used to work for such a startup. It took:

• Two experienced sales people who knew the market inside out. They also self-funded the company, and had previous experience with building a company from scratch.
• 6 experienced engineers from that industry: 3 sw, 2 fpga logic designers, 1 hardware.
• part-time accountant

• manufacturing technician who joined after the 1'st prototype was developed.

  The office was of a size of a large studio.

  It took us a year to develop a fully functional product, better than the competitor's in many characteristics. They started selling it right away.

  I guess the most important attribute was that everybody knew exactly what to do, so that time and money was spent efficiently.

You need to be able to zig and zag. When something gets in your way or your great idea just hit a major road block, you have to be able to get past it.

This sounds easy but a lot of people fall in love with their idea/direction and are reluctant to change. This does not mean you chance everyday but you need to know when road blocks occur, that you can change course to get around them.

How to remain nimble

Keep your antennas out, so you can see which way you need to jump, toward an opportunity or away from an obstacle. The opposite: hunker down, nose to the grindstone.

Stay liquid, so when you see an opportunity, you can jump on it. You have to balance two rules: "Spend no overhead before its time." and "Spend money to make money."

Delegate till it hurts. Free yourself up to be the CNO: "chief nimbleness officer." Hire people better than you are to back you up. The opposite: control freak, have to oversee every detail, can't let others do their jobs.

Stride, don't sprint. Pace yourself. Recharge your batteries. Keep the energy and bandwidth to focus on new things. The opposite: Type A, 24/7 behavior, because somebody told you that's what you must do. Here's a Zen master parable: "Every day I meditate for an hour no matter how busy I am Except those days when the crush of work is overwhelming, then I meditate two hours."

Have a mastermind group of peers who will keep you focused on the big picture and big opportunity, and who won't let you forget to execute.

This is the business I'm in. I just returned from leading our annual 3-day retreat. I took ten small business owners to a house on the coast with no internet and lousy cellphone reception. They took turns brainstorming and grilling each other on how to take advantage of the opportunities facing them, even in these lingering tough times.

I agree with Jarie. My experience is that you need to have a Plan A, Plan B and Plan C. Stay dialed into all the data you can to understand what's happening with your business. And have smart, experienced people who are able to recognize when adjustments need to be made. Don't fall in love with anything except success.

I think to be a nimble startup starts with having an idea that is flexible enough to be adjusted as conditions change.

So, if you are designing an electric car, and you are going to use a battery from company A, and you have everything so tight that only that battery will work, what happens if there is a better batter that is cylindrical, rather than having flat sides? Can your engineers quickly change the design? Or, have you designed with enough space that you can move components for a change? Basically, how flexible is your design and design process?

You need to know where your inflexible points are. For example, if you decide to write software for .NET, then if MS suddenly changed their prices, you are stuck, as changing to a different platform may be too costly.

By knowing where you can be flexible and where you cannot, you can then focus on tracking changes where you are flexible, but, that also depends on where you are in the design process.

If you have started going through testing on your car, as you have a prototype, then changing the battery may be a bad idea, that may be for version 2.

That is the other thing about being nimble, accepting that you need to ship at some point, and just start to plan on a version two, but, try to keep the interface or controls similar enough so that users don't have to relearn how to use your product. For example, if you used drive by wire in your car, and used a joystick, that may be a good design, but we want cars with steering wheels, as that is what we have experience with, using a joystick will lead to slower acceptance. So, even if you decide to use drive by wire, and later change to fiber optics (drive by light) then as long as you are still using a steering wheel the user won't notice a difference in how to use it, but they may notice the car being more nimble.

Gesco, I think the "lean startup" approach fits the concept you're describing. Lean startup is a term of art, similar to "agile starup" (if you're familiar with that term).

Ash Maurya is employing a rigorous lean startup framework to the company he's currently starting up, which he's documenting in his blog. All the articles on his blog are an excellent read -- I've learned a ton. You can check it out at http://www.ashmaurya.com/ (Note: I have no affiliation with Ash.)