Startup vision, Startup Mission and Goals: A startup is all about its grand purpose, the narrative for a beautiful outcome. In all the business pitches I’ve seen, the most inspiring part is that most founders have a beautiful vision. Most times, these visions and missions are bigger than financial gains. It comes from a place of deep passion, respect for the customer’s problem and commitment to solving it.
Even during your investment rounds, the potential investors or founders, and teammates will ask you about your purpose. It is always great to prepare your start-up basics such as
- Vision and Mission statements
- Elevator pitches and startup pitch deck
- Business Plan
In this article, we will talk about creating the startup vision and startup mission. These will need to be tied into your goal setting as a startup. I’d redirect you to the linked article about goal setting in a startup.
Plans are Great, Missions are better, plans fail but missions survive
Seth Godin
Startup Vision and Mission
The vision and mission statements play a powerful role in your company. It is important for everyone you associate with. Think about all your touchpoints and what you want them to feel. How do you want them to think about you? It will create a compelling statement about your values and what you stand for as a company.
As a founder, I’d encourage spending some time to think about these in your early stages. Note that these will change. When you start scaling, these statements will start acting as the strongest glue to hold your startup together.
What is a startup vision?
A vision is your dream as a founder. The vision answers three simple aspects
- Why you are doing this
- What will you do and
- How
The startup vision is about the purpose of your business. It will touch on the main reason for the existence of your idea as a startup. It must be simple, and easy enough to understand for any layperson. A good vision can help you convey the purpose of your business to investors, customers and potential employees. A simple startup vision template would look like this:
It comprises 3 parts: what you do, how you do it, and why you do it. The Why is of utmost importance. Please have a look into Simon Sinek’s Golden circle for more explanation on creating a compelling vision.
What is a startup mission?
A startup mission sounds similar to a vision. The difference however is that the mission only talks about what you’re trying to do. It has less to do with how and is also much smaller in size compared to a vision. Even the scope of a startup mission is smaller compared to the startup vision. The vision talks about your journey of you as an entrepreneur whereas the mission is the core reason why you exist.
Examples of mission statements:
- Airbnb: “Belong anywhere”
- Tesla: “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”
- Patagonia: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis”
Difference between vision and mission
The main difference between the startup vision and the startup mission is in their timeline. The mission is what your company does now. Whereas the vision is a journey in which you’re headed. A startup vision can afford to be more aspirational than a mission statement. The mission solves a current problem whereas the vision can be a journey and future direction.
Things to remember while setting up startup mission and vision
Things to remember while setting up a startup mission and vision
The WHY is equally important if not more than the HOW. A plan is merely the best route of action to achieve the mission and vision!
The mission provides a guiding light, clearly elucidates the minimum standards for a plan
Adjustments to a plan to reach the overall goal. What is more important – just the plan or the purpose of a plan?
A plan is pointless if it doesn’t tie in with the mission and vision of an organisation. It turns out to be a strategic outlier if we can’t connect it to
If we want to develop high-performance teams, we ought to find a way to connect the WHAT, HOW and WHY!
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Is the real mission satisfaction out of service provided or the satisfaction out of the remuneration earned after the service is provided?
That’s an interesting question Tony. It depends on the way you’d look at it. From my perspective, the remuneration is for services provided and is almost an outcome you’d have upon completion of a project/service. However, if you are looking at a sustainable business, remuneration acts as a short term motivator as opposed to the vision you want to achieve.
It again comes back to the question of goals, vision and mission. The remuneration in this case would be one of the goals to achieve, but surely the vision or mission is made of many such goals and finance adds only to part of the wider business view.