Mission Statements and Vision Statements are one of the most powerful documents your startup has; they are your startup's North Star that keeps everyone headed the same direction. When working with professionals, you shouldn't need to tell them how to do there job. You hired them because they know how to do that and you don't have the time to do that. This means that often times people have their heads down in the sand and everyone is digging towards the goal. This is the fastest way to get to the goal, but if the team is digging in the wrong direction it can lead the team astray, waste time, and jeopardize the project. The Mission and Vision should serve as the North Start that keeps the team coordinated and digging in the right direction.
There is a difference between a goal and mission. Often times people confuse the Mission and Vision with what ever goal they are excited about at that time and whatever they think will bring in more customers. This is not the Mission and Vision, it's A vision and A mission, and in fact may jeopardize the mission. The mission is whatever is best for your product and customer, and every professional mission includes the sub-mission to keep team from getting distracted and digging off coarse.
You really do want to start off with the right dream and not a pipe dream. It is critical from the start to define a official well thought out and useful Mission and Vision Statement. Necessity of the mother of all inventions, so the Mission statement should always start out with a need.
Another critical aspect of the Mission and Vision is that they must be complimentary and they must not compete with each other for the teams precious time. If your mission is to produce world-class software and your vision is to give it away for free, this may or may not be a conflict of interest. The very least you should do up front is write down at least one sentence addressing if a conflict of interest exists and if so what is the mitigating factor that makes the conflict not critical.
The mission of Astartup is to maximize the chances of success of your startup by teaching as many people as possible modern industry best practices, time optimization techniques, and Artificial Intelligence theory, and to provide free software tools to assist you in this task.
The vision of Astartup is to provide a free Markdown version of the book to all, regardless of ability to pay; and earn money by selling paper books, solely because paper books are awesome and startups need money; any money generated will be used to fund Kabuki Starship.
The mission is clear and easy to understand because it is defined in mathematical terms of maximizing the chance of success. The book is completely useless if it lowers your chance of success, so maximizing the chance is the opposite of useless and therefor provides a solution to the user that is a pain that is great enough for the user to buy a paper copy of this book.
The vision is clear and easy to understand because everyone could use a good free book, free books is the only way to get a book to everyone in the world, and it only makes sense to sell paper copies.
The mission and vision of the Astartup are complimentary because giving the book away for free along with selling paper copies maximizes the number of readers while preserving potential profits from book sales and teaching classes and workshops.
The giving away of the book for free in markdown form does not conflict with the Mission and Vision of the parent company because the parent company because the parent company business model is not selling books because the primary product is software, hardware, and cloud-based services, and provides a consulting service that is complimentary to the parent company's business model and objectives.
In order to do what the book proposes, we need some open-source software and a revenue stream. It's not a super difficult implementation and it would be pretty easy to knock off, and we would greatly benefit from crowd-sourcing the book to tap the knowledge of the international community by making it easy to contribute. By open-sourcing the software that goes with the book the chances of success go up and the cost of the development go down through the floor. This is compatible with the MinMax math behind Astartup.
The Mission and Vision does not compete with the parent company for resources because the knowledge in the book is used to both train employees and make development processes more efficient.
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