Startup success is about ‘enduring agility’

Looking back at the technology startups and apps that survived and thrived in 2009 it struck me that the companies doing well 1-2 years into their launch are the ones that were really the most agile and continued to evolve and integrate with continuous and insatiable enthusiasm.

2009 was all about integrating your platform with the big networks and technologies - Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, iPhone, etc. But success for many startups was not about the feature list they had when they launched, but how much they keep adapting after that. The winners clearly had a kind of ‘enduring agility’.

The launch of a new app, web service or startup is clearly just the beginning of a long fight to get to that first and second round of funding. But the bottom line is it takes endurance for a startup to keep adapting and coming back over and over again with increasingly tuned product features. You need time, money and and a team with plenty of gutsy enthusiasm.

Think about the dozens of new launches that hit the pages of TechCrunch and VentureBeat on a daily basis. There is plenty of choice for almost any kind of web service or app you need. But whether your talking about photo apps, travel apps, news apps, or social media apps, it’s difficult to really ‘seperate the men from the boys’ until you start using the service and really understand how it meets your needs as the customer.

Even the best app on day 1 is going to fall short of customer’s expectations simply because it’s new (probably a beta launch) and may not have simply had that much customer exposure during testing. The startups that realise the launch is only the starting line, are the ones that are primed to keep running and keep iterating - release after release.

So in a world flooded with hundreds of overnight successes and failures, let’s just say the ‘new success’ is all about consideration, iteration and good old fashioned perspiration.