Go Chicken, Egg Later

As a start-up company, you have to deal with "chicken or the egg" problems everyday. Here are a few examples:

You: "I believe this business can be huge. Having some external funding would really help us aggressively address this opportunity."
Investor: "Sounds interesting, but I need to see some serious tractions before we would be interested in investing."
Your Friend: "Sounds like you have a chicken or the egg problem."

You: "I need to get some business partners to support our business in order that I can attract some significant customers."
Business Partner: "I would need to see some customer testimonials and successes before we would be interested in participating in a business partnership."
Your Friend: "Sounds like you have a chicken or the egg problem."

You: "We are needing to drive user awareness and adoption in order to grow this business faster."
Marketing/PR Advisor: "Your story would be much better if you had some significant "unique visitors" and "registered users."
Your Friend: "Sounds like you have a chicken or the egg problem."

So my advice to other business founders dealing with the same problem is to focus on the chicken. In the case of GetQuik, we have the challenge of needing restaurant partners to get customers, and customers to get restaurant partners. So rather than trying to solve both problems, we choose ONE and only one battle. We focused all our energy on getting restaurant partners. We are closing in on 100 restaurant participating on our site. Now we have the chicken or at least a chick, we now have to figure out how to get this chicken to lay eggs. We are switching gears to drive increased user traffic to our site (THE EGG).

It is amazing how many "chicken and egg" problems you can solve by taking action, focusing, and simply overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.

We have solved a good chunk of our "chicken and the egg" challenges, and have many more to go.

Keep this in mind. The answer to "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" is not the most important thing. What is important is that there are both chickens and eggs. In fact there are 35 million chickens in the US alone! Good luck on your chicken/egg quest.