Charlotte Startup Diaries: The most important factor in your startup’s success

My boss of several years — serial Charlotte entrepreneur Mac Lackey — had asked me and his longtime business partner Ross Saldarini to this meeting to present his new idea for a company.

Under Mac’s elbow I could see the green title slide of a slick-looking presentation. I could make out the faint lines of a soccer field. All it said was “KYCK: The Global Soccer Conversation”.

That was the beginning.

What followed that meeting was five years grinding to build KYCK into a successful startup. We raised money. We built mobile apps and online software. We partnered with some of the biggest soccer organizations in the country. And we made countless mistakes and tweaks.

I joined Mac in his mission with one main personal goal: to see what it’s like to build a company from an idea to a milestone outcome, whether that milestone was a sale, bankruptcy, or a profits-sustaining business. My longer-term ambition has always been to start a company myself, but I wanted to go into that with my eyes wide open…armed with enough experience to avoid certain pitfalls.

While doing my share to run, grow, and fund KYCK, I learned many important lessons about the entrepreneurial path in general, and specifically about that way of life in Charlotte. I’d like to pass some of those lessons on, with the hope that these nuggets can fast-track other local entrepreneurs. It’s important, our city’s slowly maturing startup scene; it could be what keeps 704 relevant in the future.

And with that, we come to my first major takeaway: In real estate, it’s Location, Location, Location. In startups, it’s Timing, Timing, Timing.

The most important factor in the success of your startup will be its timing.

Yes, your idea matters some (not much), your execution matters (a lot more), your team matters (see: your execution), your business model is important (though you’re probably wrong at first), and so on. But it’s your timing that will make you or break you.

As an example of why timing is so important, consider the importance of one word: BUFFERING.

If you’re over the age of 20, you probably recognize this dreaded word as the thing that used to keep you from watching the online video you wanted to watch and the thing that made you want to cancel your RoadRunner subscription. Please please don’t let the runtime catch up to the gray bar. Go gray bar, go! Oh, it caught up. Stupid buffering. My internet is too slow to watch this video. Ugh.

Why does that matter? Because there were other youtubes before there was YouTube. There were earlier innovators in online video, innovators in the Age of Widespread Buffering. What made YouTube an enormous acquisition was its content base and its timing — previous wannabe youtubes were too early, before high-speed internet was widely distributed enough to make online video what it has become. What good is a video content platform/library if not enough people can watch it enjoyably?

Some companies that entered that market too early got a zero. Companies too late had to answer “How do you compete with YouTube?” YouTube got $1.6 Billion from our search friends at Google.

I’ll say it again: The most important factor in the success of your startup will be its timing.

It’s true that not all startups are shooting for the grand-slam exit price that YouTube achieved. In that way, maybe it’s not the best example. But it’s an example we all know about, and I saw this lesson play out very relevantly in our business as well. The first product we rolled out in 2012 we loved, but the timing was wrong. With heavy hearts we shelved it soon after and changed our offering to something completely different — something the market kept telling us was needed more right now.

So, if it’s about Timing, Timing, Timing, how do you get that right? Or how do you improve your chances if you get it wrong? Is Timing much different from Luck? Future posts will focus on those topics.

In the meantime, I’ll end with this: If you’re an entrepreneur in Charlotte, your timing to do that in this community is the best it has ever been. There are more like-minded community members organizing Meetups, more investors who are interested in funding new companies (and more investors who understand angel investing), and more co-working spaces to incubate ideas. In 2016 we have it better than the earliest pioneers, guys like Mac Lackey and others who had to scratch and claw to meet with bank executives to convince them that this thing called the Internet was relevant and that their banks needed a website (and that they’d be happy to build those sites).

Yes, it’s better now, but we all hope and think the best time is still to come.

I need to credit this TED Talk from Bill Gross, which blew my mind and made so much sense to me, and which serves as the foundation for this first post. You can watch it on…wait for it…YouTube.

To contribute to this series, email Trent at [email protected].