Becoming a startup studio founder is a dream role for anyone with a passion for entrepreneurship, team management, and helping developing great ideas into real-life companies. For those looking to get started in the industry, it can be daunting to understand what you should know and how you should execute on your goals. While Startup Studio Insider has already developed an article on The Top Qualities for Startup Studio Founders, take a look at four of our insights into developing yourself into an accomplished startup studio founder!
Build the Right Team
No startup studio can function in a vacuum. Developing the right team around you is one of the best ways to ensure long-term success not just of your venture, but also of the startups your studio develops into launchable businesses.
A successful team can look very different for different startup studios, but there is one core similarity between all successful startup studios: a wide diversity of skills. As a founder, it should be your primary goal to find teammates who complement your strengths and weaknesses. Think creatively about what you need to ensure your team is well supported, and make sure you find people who not only have different skill sets from yourself but also think differently from you.
Perfect your Market Analysis
A startup studio must be operating at the absolute forefront of the latest market research. Otherwise, the startups founded will invariably be out of touch, underbaked, and reiterative versions of currently existing ideas.
As a startup studio founder, it is your role to provide your studio with the vision for what can be realistically achieved. For example, understanding not just the industry and areas where innovation is needed but also understanding the size of a startup that can be accommodated in the current whitespace is a clear distinction that startup studio founders must be prepared for.
Furthermore, ensure that you’re staying up to date with the research necessary to back up your claims, something that becomes all the more important should an idea fail to develop into what you hoped.
Hone in the Application Process
When operating a startup studio, your business model lives or dies with the success of your owned operations. Ensuring these startups have been properly vetted is one of the most critical aspects of running a successful startup studio, and developing a system to ensure each organization is adequately assessed is one of the best ways for startup studio founders to realize success.
Startup studios often receive hundreds, if not thousands, of interested applicants. Developing a system to sort out unqualified startups from more refined and likely to succeed options is the first step to honing in the application process. One key way to do this is to look through the actual experience of the applicants at hand. Some startup studios divide applicants into technologists and business experts as one way of determining their eligibility for working at a studio. If they do not have enough experience in at least one of these fields, it is significantly less likely that their idea, even if it is one of the best you’ve seen, can be developed at a reasonable pace.
Once you’ve narrowed down your candidates to those with the right level of experience for your studio, now is the time to dive into their ideas and learn more about them as a person. Setting up calls can be an efficient and informative way to determine not just if the person’s idea is worth developing, but also if they are a person you can reasonably see yourself working with. For the startups that advance beyond this qualification, develop a questionnaire, or specific interview questions, unique to each pitch, and use this to better understand how you and the startup can see yourselves growing together.
Keep Everyone on Time and Under Budget
While we understand that keeping a number of startups in various stages of development both on time and under budget is easier said than done, any startup studio founder must develop a strategy in order to ensure emerging startups are held responsible for their progress, while also encouraging them to maximize their performance and capabilities.
As a rule of thumb, deadlines and budgets should not be adjusted after they are initially decided on the most recent market research. If one of these options will not be met, it is more advisable to change the scope instead of revisiting the timelines and resource allocation, as this can be a slippery slope for any startup studio. It also gives a clear vision of what should be achieved and ensures the startup under your command will do everything they can to meet these expectations.
Additionally, one way to ensure your teams are meeting these expectations is to schedule as frequent check-ins and meetings as possible. Through these meetings, teams can establish checkpoints on their ways to achieving goals, and also progress can be more regularly assessed to ensure success.
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