More than established businesses, startups have to contend with not becoming like the mixed-up chameleon from the children’s story.
In case you haven’t heard of it, The Mixed-Up Chameleon by Eric Carle tells the story of a chameleon who likes to change his colors, but when he goes to the zoo and sees so many amazing animals, he decides he envies or admires this animal or that one. Rather than just appreciating their skills, he changes himself, bit by bit, until he’s no longer the fly-catching chameleon. Instead, he’s a mix of dozens of animals. And now, he can’t do the one thing he really needs to do to survive: be stealthy and skilled enough to catch the fly.
Startups are, by nature, constantly evolving and developing. Much like how we may try on different hairstyles or mix with different groups in our youth as we try to figure out who we are and where we fit in, startups do the same — just with what features they have or which lines they use in their copy. But the key to coming out with a cohesive, strategic product involves having a strong sense of who your startup is, what your startup does and who your startup wants to be. This is true both with how you present yourself to the public and how you present yourself to investors.
It can be tempting to try to be all things to all people, but when you do that, sometimes you find that you can’t do the thing you originally set out to do — the thing that makes you unique and special. Everytime a new feature request comes through or a communications message needs to be put out or a problem needs to be solved, it’s good to go back to your original vision and ask, “Does this align with who we are, with the problem we’re trying to solve?”
At Correlate, we’re focused on embracing and empowering intentional focus, individuality and collaboration in an era of re-evaluating our relationship with work. We want you to have meaningful accomplishments, and we don’t want you to feel like you’re bogged down by complexity. It’s why we’ve focused on the most common integrations that people use rather than offering hundreds or even thousands; we don’t want to split your attention or overwhelm you with options. It’s also why we’ve focused on a super-clean design and a powerful cross-platform search option that lets you see what you need, when you need it, where you need it. And it’s why we’ve focused on collaborative features that recognize both the need to add context to content and the fact that you can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to productivity.
We’ve tried to make the most of technology with our “less can be more” approach to knowledge management, and we hope you’ll enjoy seeing us do what we do best.
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