Do you dream of founding a business or starting a successful project within your company? Most of those ventures are made difficult by ourselves because we follow a perfectionist convention.
Founders aren’t heroes
Entrepreneurship is heroised and awakens fears with many people. They doubt if they are capable of being brave enough to start their own business. If you take a closer look at all those successful entrepreneurs though you will see that very few of them had a thought through plan. More often than not they had a personal problem (like I did with my second venture) or were trying to do something very different (like me with my first venture). What unites them though is that they all made buying offers to potential customers in a very early stage which gave them the opportunity to learn fast by failing early.
Don’t confuse this with a “just do it” mentality. This would suggest that it IS after all just courage that you need to start your project. That all it takes is to overcome your resistance of letting everything else behind and leaping head first into a totally unpredictable endeavour.
I’m advocating something else. Courageous is what most founders do. They cling to the idea that they have to perfect a plan that can never be perfected. By doing this they invest tons of time, money and personal identification into something that, due to the lack of market exposure, might never take off. That IS truly brave. But rather stupid too. Always remember: markets are irrational. Neither you, your friends nor any experienced mentor can predict how your idea will be received.
Forget about elaborate market research, forget about customer surveys, (at least at the beginning) forget about funding. Instead focus on creating real buying (or very related) situations so that you get real market exposure and the rejection that comes along with it. That’s all that counts.
I know receiving rejection isn’t fun. But who is being rejected anyway. That’s a question for next week.
Where am I?
Did you stumbled upon this page accidentally? It’s part of an eight week series about the way I challenge conventions and how this enabled me to live an unconstrained and free life. Find out more here.