CREATE A SOLUTION, NOT MORE PROBLEMS

Success, when it comes to business, is usually defined by making a certain amount of money, growing your company at a certain rate, popularity or power. But a business can only be successful by any of those measures if it solves a problem. The problem may be an issue that has plagued humanity for generations or it could just be a recent, minor annoyance of modern life that the business smooths over. Either way, if people are willing to pay for it, you got yourself a successful business.

Do We Have A Problem Here?

Solving a problem sounds simple, but sometimes the trickiest part is identifying the problem, or making people aware that there is one. Once you’ve decided that there is a problem, it’s important to write a description of the problem, when and where the problem occurs and how you know it’s an actual problem. This is called writing a problem statement. Do not write your solution or opinion into the problem statement. Keep it simple.

Doing this exercise ensures that your team has complete alignment around the foundations of your company from the beginning. This is a critical element that safeguards you against distraction and ensures you have a clear path forward that you can measure your performance against.

Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want

Once the team agrees on the problem, you still have to find out if the public agrees. One of the biggest mistakes a founder can make is believing you know what consumers want without asking. You need to go out and talk to potential consumers, testing and proving your assumptions, one way or another. The entrepreneurial graveyard is littered with the husks of companies that thought they knew what people wanted better than the actual people did. Hunger for truth. Ask people what they want (with or without the Spice Girls as a soundtrack).

Unlearn Before You Have To Undo

Each time that I have tried to start a company, I have quickly learned that I didn’t know everything. You could make a list of what not to do as an entrepreneur, and it would look a lot like my entire life. In hindsight, the biggest lesson that I learned is to surround myself with mentors with real industry experience. Thinking that I knew about the nuances of an industry almost broke my company. I now always look to partner with industry veterans, as they are truly the most important sounding boards. I learned not to exaggerate my strengths or weaknesses because without transparency and a sincere willingness to learn, I would never be able to take the full opportunity to learn from others.

Minimum Viable “Product”

Everyone throws out the word Minimum Viable Product (MVP), but not everyone understands what it means. An MVP isn’t a product at all (or a baseball power hitter), it’s a tool for figuring out what you should be building. What you build should be based on the experiment you are running, which should be targeting your biggest risk or most significant assumption. And it should accomplish what you want it to with the bare minimum of features.

A scaled down version of your product can give you insight into the potential market. You can find out if it really solves a problem and if people would actually pay for it as well as what is valuable to your customers (and what isn’t). This will help you make truly data-driven decisions and have the opportunity to continually improve.

Spending time and effort on something only to find out it doesn’t work and you have to start over is painful, but the sooner you go back to the drawing board, the less painful it is. You need to be flexible, especially in the early stages of a company, or you’ll never be able to adapt to new knowledge and insight.

The need to start over more than once teaches valuable lessons about why metrics matter and why you should look for ways to increase the feedback you get on an idea. If you don’t get any feedback, you’re walking blindly into a market full of avoidable traps.

Pay Attention

Don’t forget that your highest priority is to satisfy your customer. Pay attention to what your customers care about, and the pain points that they are experiencing. Instead of rushing into starting a company based on a solution that you believe in, acknowledge the value of going slower to work on your product through the process of continued learning and context.

Perseverance is necessary. Be patient.