Incubating Unicorns through Agile Startups

Time-to-market speed is a critical metric that determines whether a start-up has the potential to become a unicorn. Today’s start-ups are growing about twice as fast as those founded a decade ago – one reason helping them being the adoption of technology. Many of today’s unicorns are born digital and started by innovators with the end goal to transform the world. They usually exist on an agile platform, innovate rapidly and are scalable enough for a large, global customer base. This is why we ensure that the start-ups in our incubator are born in the acceleration mode .

While there are thousands of new businesses that pop up every year, most startups fail, and only a small percentage of the startups who succeed can become full-fledged unicorns. To improve those odds for your startup, they need to be extremely agile.

Agile startups know that nothing kills their original vision faster than department silos, management hierarchies, and bureaucracy. They grow their teams three times faster than other startups, and unicorns typically hire at an even faster pace. Everything happens fast, including recruiting.

To create products that consumers actually want, they have to identify ways to improve the lives of a specific target audience. Most select a Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) for their business. An MTP is a highly ambitious goal that drives the team and encourages them to think outside the box to reach the set goal. With a clear vision in mind, these unicorn companies achieve growth by validating their marketing and sales channels with local testing, then quickly replicating the successful strategies in other locations.

Unicorns also offer a strong value proposition or a promise of how and why the product will bring value to customers. They employ strategies that allow them to scale at exponential rates, thus they’re dubbed as “exponential organizations”.

To scale a company, like a unicorn, one should establish clear growth goals and identify a vision for the company, or perhaps an MTP. Growing companies need to take advantage of technologies and software available to help the business scale. As technology becomes more integrated with business operations, advanced tools help elevate the startup.

Disruption is also a good thing, especially for aspiring unicorns. Disruption refers to innovation in an industry that radically affects the way that the industry or market operates. Disruption requires startups to come up with new, creative solutions that might differ from the conventional. They think outside the box and seek to innovate, but also remain agile so they can pivot at any given time.

They gain the edge by applying the concept of building MVPs through a business approach that’s known as the Lean Startup, in which startups can maximize efficiency by repeatedly testing and adjusting their MVPs based on user feedback. Since MVPs are only equipped with the “must-have” features, it’s more cost-effective to build and allows you to pivot without sacrificing a fully made product.

One example of a successful MVP is Uber. They initially tested their MVP with only three cars and a simple interface, collecting user feedback after each ride to make improvements. After adding new features over the years, Uber has grown to be a world-renowned company.

Like Uber’s early MVP, your MVP doesn’t have to be fully complete. It’s meant to gauge whether users are interested in the product at all, so if there’s no interest, you can scrap it and pivot to another idea.

To become a unicorn, you need adaptability, perseverance, and resilience at the core. Having this mindset is especially useful during times of business uncertainty as it allows you to get through the crisis and sustain growth during unpredictable conditions.

This requires financial planning and effective cost management throughout the business life cycle to aim for a long-term growth curve. Also required is a will to reduce the burn rate by cutting unnecessary costs and investing in the most important things — the product and the team.

MEASA is helping lean, agile start-ups navigate this challenging path to become tomorrow’s Unicorn. It might not happen overnight. Even the fastest-growing startups may need to go through multiple rounds of funding to achieve unicorn status.

While there isn’t an exact recipe to build a unicorn startup, the strategies being shared within MEASA’s Pioneer Club can help take agile entrepreneurs to the next level. Once a simple, affordable solution to address users’ problems and scale up is developed, reaching unicorn standards is only a step away.

Pioneer Tech

MEASA’s Pioneer Tech community is composed of early to growth-stage companies that are involved in the design, development and deployment of new technologies and innovations that are poised to have a significant impact on business and society.