Time! Time! Time!

Time...

Market timing is a critical element in the growth and success of any business.

You can never predict with pinpoint accuracy when a market will ignite, you can have a pretty good idea within a couple of years. It is essential that you understand in great detail the specific ecosystem factors that impact your target customers' willingness and ability to adopt your solution.

As a startup, you don't want to be a salmon. You want to swim with the stream and not against the stream. You also want to take advantage of the incumbent competition's inability to address the customer pain point because it would destroy their current business. This is the case even if the current solution to the customers' problem is doing nothing or doing something in a vastly inferior way than what you are providing.

Being a little early is okay, but being late is a disaster.

As a startup, it is okay to be early to market as long as you aren't massively early to market. If your product is available within 12-24 months of the perfectly ripe market conditions and you have delivered a best in breed solution with a significant price-performance advantage versus alternative solution, you have executed with very good timing. If you are late to market, you will likely lose. Only fast followers that differentiate primarily based in a superior cost structure due to scale can win as a follower.

Work hard to understand the PESTEL factors that positively or negatively impact your markets. Understand what is inside your control or sphere of influence, and understand what you purely need to monitor.

Look at your industry structure and how it can affect adoption of your solution. If you do this, you can make your own luck as it relates to timing.

Imagine a business where everything else is perfect: You have a great idea, a theoretically brilliant business model, a talented team and enough funding to get the ball rolling. But if your idea comes too early and consumers aren’t ready for it, they won’t readily adopt your system. If your idea comes too late and there are already a number of different competitors in front of your target audience, you won’t be able to squeeze in.

Timing can’t be ignored, and it can’t be substituted just by paying more attention to the other elements of your business. Certainly, having a good idea, business model, team and available capital can all increase your chances of success, but without that critical timing factor, you’ll inevitably end up failing/struggling.

With that said, do you think time is the most important factor to success of a startup?