3-5 Sources of Differentiation

Successful companies consciously choose the few areas where they want to make a difference, and try to maintain just standard efficiency and competence at everything else.

Concentrated use of resources

This is so that key resources can consciously be directed at strengthening differentiation ever further, rather than spreading them across many different activities in which they make no discernible difference in the eye of the customer.

Flywheel: sources of differentiation building on one another

At $Company, we are still working on our key sources of differentiation. We hope that they would intertwine so that our business model becomes a self-fulfilling, virtuous cycle (or flywheel).

Intermediate differentiating factors

For now some differentiating factors are:

  1. Usability: must be most usable for small companies (<50 people)
  2. Customer success: offer the most onboarding/videos of anyone in the industry

New content

This page is updated regularly. Please check the Midstage Manual for new content for this page.**

About Midstage Institute

We focus our practice on midstage startup companies that need to remain agile, and where what used to work for the smaller startup just isn’t as effective anymore.

 

We ensure founders and leadership teams win, with our over 40 years experience in venture-backed tech startups. We are Silicon Valley veterans with the scars and wins to prove it. We don’t use an inflexible off-the shelf methodology, we adapt best practices to you, your market, your company, and your leadership team.

 

We always:

  • Focus on right sized best practices to get to the next level
  • Focus on the 20% of effort that will yield you 80% of the benefits
  • Teach Perfection is the enemy, better is your partner and ally
  • Align with your business needs so you can thrive