Starting a Start-Up: Deadlines

This post has been updated at 04/08/2011.

No one likes deadlines. But do you remember story of Duke Nukem Forever? Deadlines are useful, if not necessary. Today on how we use deadlines to help us achieve our goals.

The Importance of Deadlines for Start-Ups

I believe deadlines are much more important for start-ups than for anything else. There are many reasons for that:

• Building a start-up is a huge and hard task requiring knowledge of many non-related areas of knowledge. You can easily spend ages on it.
• Most of the people building a start-up never done it before.
• There is, really a deadline. It can be expectation of your VC or just the fact that your team won't work on something what doesn't have results for long.
• And of course if you love start-ups and want to succeed, you have to be prepared to fail quickly and move on to another one.

The faster you fail, the less time you loose. It's better to acknowledge your fail than to stubbornly try to feed a project no one is interested in.

Managing Deadlines

Small Deadlines (Sprints)

SCRUM methodology has units called sprints: each sprint takes a few weeks (we use 14 days per sprint) and has its goals which you are supposed to finish. It's very useful for making sure you're on time in achieving the bigger deadlines.

Big Deadlines

Deadline for going live keeps you from playing with unnecessary, adding too many features and generally wasting your time. We set this deadline fairly strictly (1.5 months for the web app we're building). We believe you should launch as soon as possible with the smallest subset of features you really need.

If you have a bigger project, you should definitely consider to add deadline for launching version available to your alpha testers (or to anyone if you want and feel confident that you can handle it).

What I believe is even more important is a deadline for proving people are interested in the product. It doesn't necessarily mean you go profitable, it's purely about the interest, to make sure you're working on something people actually want. Of course you're supposed to lead the dialog with potential customers even before you start to work on the actual product, but you never know.

This could take some time. We set this deadline to 4 months. It can take a few iteractions to get there.

Later on we want to add deadline for going profitable. A lot of products are popular, but makes no money (surprisingly popular nowadays with all the mindless hype behind web 2.0). I personally don't like it. I'm not saying you can't make money on it: sure you can, you just have to find someone to believe in its potential and sell it to him. But it's not exactly what I'd consider to be a viable business plan.