The Crucial Role of Timing in Startup Success ⌛

How Good Timing Makes Great Products

Paul Orlando is a former startup founder. He now builds startup accelerators and incubators and helps companies understand and improve their unit economics (Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Cost), which he then uses to guide their growth strategy.

He spent the past few years focused on the timing question and distilled his findings into a concise, practical book. The book is called Why Now: How Good Timing Makes Great Products

Today, I'm glad to have him share his major findings in this article. I hope you find it helpful!

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They say timing is everything in business. In fact, in a survey of 800 VCs, timing was one of the top reasons they noted behind successful or failed investments. (And though it might seem counterintuitive, being early is often more dangerous than being late.)

But how do you determine if your timing (or “why now”) is right? I set out to learn more through research and testing my findings. Along the way I developed a set of helpful frameworks and a process that I bring investors, founders, and innovation teams through as they consider where to put resources.

Here’s a list of 8 insights and recommendations I developed along the way:

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1. Look for what I call Timing Drivers

I track 12 types of drivers in a general sense and have teams I work with go into detail for their specific situations. The drivers I track include everything from the Technological (for example, performance curves and cost improvements), Installed Base (critical mass reached in users of supporting equipment and systems), Capital Access (sources and availability), and more. These drivers are a mental shorthand for where to look for environmental changes. These drivers are also most likely changes that are happening outside of your control. Some may have a level of predictability to them, while others may not. You notice change and then put your perspective behind what’s changing.

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2. Connect the Timing Drivers to your potential business model.

Timing Drivers need to improve an existing business model or make a new one possible. Otherwise, you don’t have a timing advantage. You only have a new capability that is at risk of being financially unsustainable. Companies that skip this step can end up wasting the money they raise because what they’ve built may never produce enough value for customers or may never enable the business to capture enough value back from their customers.

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3. Timing shifts your market size.

If we’re not simply evaluating an unchanging, well-understood market, then we should think differently about the role that timing has in potential market size. Too often we look at markets as being measurable and static or as undergoing dramatic growth, but don’t understand what produces that static or dynamic market. Timing plays a part here. In the year 1900 you can’t estimate the market for cars by extrapolating from the existing number of horses.

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4. There are “Timing Patterns” we can learn from.

These are repeated combinations of timing drivers that offer us examples to learn from. I’ve written about some of the most common I’ve observed. These patterns help give us a starting place to look for potential timing advantages.