Opinion: How sticking to the core value can keep your startup alive

Photo credit: Pexels.

Trial and error is a continuous process in startups. Founders need to minimize errors and ensure a healthy development of their company. Sticking to their “stem cell” can help.

Do you care about your startup’s sales more than its stem cell?

(The stem cell of a product is the value customers are paying for. Before writing this post, I thought of using the term DNA, but science has proven that stem cell therapy can treat or prevent fatal diseases.)

Stem cells of successful businesses

Facebook’s stem cell is friends. Twitter has tweets, Dropbox has files, YouTube has videos, Pinterest has pins, Uber and Grab have rides, Agoda has hotels, and Airbnb has beds.

Look at all these successful startups and you’ll notice one common thing: throughout their growth, they’ve all stayed true to their stem cell.

This concept is why WhatsApp (the king of text messaging) has never ventured into the ever-popular sticker market (like Line) and instead opted to bide its time (unlike Viber) and focus its energy on perfecting data calls while waiting for the market to mature.

It’s the same reason why Skype, which I use often, has remained relatively unchanged over the past 10 years, with just one new “mention” feature to mark the passage of time.

On the other hand, startups that try to operate outside their stem cell routinely end up broke and alone. Take Evernote as an example. Instead of focusing on its stem cell of note taking, it tried to rapidly pump out (unsuccessful) new products like Skitch, Work Chat, Evernote Food, and more. And where did that diversion take Evernote? To a not-so-good place.

Even more notorious and short-lived is Google Wave. Wave was too greedy, trying to dominate social media and email simultaneously while never really doing justice to its chat app. While it had plenty of functionality, no one could see its stem cell.

Me with Eric Schmidt, Google/Alphabet Inc. chairman.

A few days ago, I had the amazing opportunity to sit down and have lunch with Eric Schmidt of a “fairly large” company known as Alphabet Inc. Aside from discussing how he sees Vietnam will change in the next five or 10 years, Schmidt spent most of his time sharing many interesting stories about Chrome and Gmail and emphasized that event the US government has no impact on the privacy of Gmail.

He repeatedly gave this advice: If you want your personal data to be protected, use Gmail.

Questioning the stem cell

An empty cafe: A proof of lost stem cell

Fighting to keep our stem cell