Startup Success Engineering

Success is a complex phenomenon. Google search on "How to make your startup successful" gives impression that it knows more than 11,90,00,000 items related to startup success. There are countless podcasts, articles, videos and opinion posts from various masters of this science and yet, most founders don't really seem to have clarity around success dynamics. Let's simplify it with a very powerful model of success activation.

Fundamentally, there are 3 core quests for any startup:

First and the most critical quest is the Value quest - startups must create significant enough value for their customers to survive and thrive the value game
Next comes the Commerce quest - startups must find value monetisation design to capture certain % of the value created for their customers in order to establish healthy unit economics
And the last one is the Growth quest - startups must systematically grow their business footprint and sustainably operate with large market share

To master these quests, startups have to face 3 levels of challenges:

1st - discover a design of high potential

2nd - realise the potential by systematically iterating, executing and getting best possible alignment with the market

3rd - defend your realized gainful position over time.

Why do startups need Success Engineering?

It's a simple but immensely powerful 3x3 grid that encapsulates the startup success design. This Success Grid is the core foundation of all playbooks that we use in startup game planning to analyze and engineer a startup's DNA map for the success.

Why Success Engineerig

Why Startups need Success Engineering?

There is one single most crucial factor that separates successful startups from the rest and that is "Venture-Market alignment".

Every market has a DNA that characterises the market' s operational dynamics. It sets the rules of the game. On other side, every venture has a Success DNA that characterises venture's winning game play. Startups are 10x more likely to succeed if it's Success DNA is a good fit for the market's DNA than otherwise.

As a founder, you may not be able to alter the market' s DNA for your success. But what you can certainly do - you can engineer your venture's Success DNA to ensure it fits well with the market's DNA. Startups have limited resources, constrained financial capital and have far too many unknowns to sort out. Without a proper game planning, founders end up taking blind bets on the market. Instead, they must engineer their venture's Success DNA to strongly align with their market's DNA and efficiently use their resources to build their success path. This is what we call success engineering.

How can startups unlock the Success Grid ?

What's in the game plan

Unlocking the Startup Success Grid

Each cell of the startup success grid has a specific power-play that can be unlocked by success engineering techniques mastered by successful serial entrepreneurs. Startup game planning is essentially a comprehensive play-book of such success engineering techniques that unlock the value power, commerce power and growth power for the startup.

The startup game planning play-book contains three main success engineering tools:

1) Powerplay map - this map is a combination of power activation methods, risk/barrier profiling and evidence profiling for all three quests - value quest, commerce quest and growth quest.

2) Venture Success DNA map - DNA maps are simple tools to assess the venture's power-play position in the market and use it to engineer the venture's DNA to achieve winning venture-market alignment. It contains value DNA maps, commerce DNA maps and growth DNA maps.

3) 10 Power-play hacks - these are 10 most popular strategic choices that have been exploited by successful entrepreneurs over years to unlock the success grid for them. Startup game planning play-book studies these power-play hacks in detail and helps founders to refining their venture running strategies.