I wonder whether repeatability alone is enough to distinguish a startup from an implementation business.
A team can standardize delivery and still be scaling a solution whose demand depends heavily on founder-led selling or customer-specific adaptation.
Would the stronger test be whether the company has discovered a repeatable reason to switch (and pay), not merely a repeatable, perhaps even forced, way to deliver?
And ultimately, it’s the founders’ decision whether they build a platform, service, product, or whatever business model they believe makes sense. But providing customer-specific solutions is a different business model from building a repeatable product or service business.
Repeatability is one aspect; scalability is another part of the common definition of a startup. Implementation businesses are quite often not that scalable, revenue grows with the team. That's where I drew the line.
I wonder if the dangerous bit is that the agency version can look successful for quite a while. You’ve got customers, recurring revenue and plenty of demand, so saying no to custom work can feel like deliberately slowing down a business that’s working.
This maps to what Palantir figured out with forward-deployed engineers: high-touch delivery can fund product discovery, but only if you're ruthless about extracting the repeatable 20% into an actual product. The job-screening and support-AI founders you describe seem stuck because they never made that extraction, the service just became the product. Did any of your 10 have a real roadmap to kill the customization layer, or were they just hoping growth would paper over it?
Three out of ten had a good idea of what that repeatable scalable section was. Two even with a clear technology moat that they didn't see in the market yet. But for some, I just told them the short version of this blog post, to say: watch out!
Thanks, Jeroen.
I wonder whether repeatability alone is enough to distinguish a startup from an implementation business.
A team can standardize delivery and still be scaling a solution whose demand depends heavily on founder-led selling or customer-specific adaptation.
Would the stronger test be whether the company has discovered a repeatable reason to switch (and pay), not merely a repeatable, perhaps even forced, way to deliver?
And ultimately, it’s the founders’ decision whether they build a platform, service, product, or whatever business model they believe makes sense. But providing customer-specific solutions is a different business model from building a repeatable product or service business.
Repeatability is one aspect; scalability is another part of the common definition of a startup. Implementation businesses are quite often not that scalable, revenue grows with the team. That's where I drew the line.
I wonder if the dangerous bit is that the agency version can look successful for quite a while. You’ve got customers, recurring revenue and plenty of demand, so saying no to custom work can feel like deliberately slowing down a business that’s working.
Yeah, I'm mentoring a startup right now that felt reluctant at first to start to say not to clients, but they are now understanding the relevance.
This maps to what Palantir figured out with forward-deployed engineers: high-touch delivery can fund product discovery, but only if you're ruthless about extracting the repeatable 20% into an actual product. The job-screening and support-AI founders you describe seem stuck because they never made that extraction, the service just became the product. Did any of your 10 have a real roadmap to kill the customization layer, or were they just hoping growth would paper over it?
Three out of ten had a good idea of what that repeatable scalable section was. Two even with a clear technology moat that they didn't see in the market yet. But for some, I just told them the short version of this blog post, to say: watch out!