Building Momentum from a Standstill

The last couple of weeks, I shared some discussions with a CEO of a services start-up here in Phoenix. She and her team of three were having a disconnect about how quickly or slowly they were progressing. It was obvious that there was a communication break-down, but the underlying theme is that each person's perspective was very different regarding how fast the company was progressing. It didn't help that one of her team-mates thought she wasn't doing enough... Why is it that she was unable to make significant strides on a weekly, bi-weekly basis? I don't have all of the details for her company, but I venture to say that her company and mine are in similar boats.

Momentum is something we all wish to have as entrepreneurs, because this type of self-powered energy that gets a lot accomplished in a short amount of time. But to get to momentum requires that a lot of sweat equity is used in a small amount of time, and time, as usual is something we all have less and less of. Whether it's services or software, her start-up and mine share the same obstacles:

1. full-time day jobs with part-time start-up
2. zero compensation during early start-up phase
3. other ideas??

So the key is to ask ourselves, how do we get momentum for free? That's really the question. I can't speak for her services business (hopefully she'll comment to this blog), but from a software engineering perspective, the current wisdom of the crowd is to get a product out quickly so that the customers can start to provide feedback.

The following post at The Ideal Startup (Engineering) Team blog, speaks to the importance of designing for usability because valuable feedback can be gathered early on. Of course, this begs the question about how we can keep our idea under wraps so competitors don't feed off of it, but that may be a risk we'll have to do. They don't speak about how to acheive momentum for free, but I suspect that if we keep the customer in mind we'll be able to make ourselves design for them. Makes me wonder whether the customer survey that we created months ago should be revisited and actually sent out??

So does anyone have ideas as to how to get past square one? How did you achieve momentum for your start-up?

-john