| Don't try to follow the unicorn route. Make sure you set the bar low. You survive against unicorns by being an ant. Be very, very cautious of scope creep. That doesn't mean low quality. When you set the bar low enough, you're in a different playing field, somewhere unicorns don't fit. You're a bottom feeder. But make sure you cross the bar you set. That's all you have to do, just promise and deliver. You can overdeliver. Nobody's going to VC back a subscription razor service. You can make sharper razors, cheaper razors, nicer boxes. You can put a perfumed handwritten note in everyone's first box. You're specializing so there's not much else to do. But do keep an eye on your scheduling. Hit deadlines you set for yourself. Setting deadlines lets you figure what matters and what doesn't, or whether you're scoping too big. You shouldn't have a mountain of work. That's not what success means. Scope it down to an anthill. There's something out there that fits you perfectly. Spend a lot of time planning because you can't just throw resources at everything to see what sticks. It takes as much effort to make a bad product as it does to make a good one, probably more. So don't waste your time making something that doesn't fit you. Make use of things like prototypes. Carefully evaluate what isn't working. |
Dollar Shave Club has raised a total of $163.5M in funding over 7 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Nov 19, 2015 from a Series D round.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dollar-shave-club/co...