Execution = Continuous Learning

“Ideas are overrated and execution is undervalued”

This was my most used quote in 2016 and will probably continue to be the case for this year too. Think about this, if you complete reading a textbook on football, you wouldn’t call yourself a footballer. You have to experience the sport by playing football before you could call yourself a footballer. Even then, a differentiation exists between a professional footballer being paid to play football and someone who plays in the park with friends. So why do so many call themselves an entrepreneur simply because they have ideas? Or because they have read a book like the Lean Startup? Perhaps we need a new definition for professional entrepreneurs to differentiate from those that ‘play the game of entrepreneurship.’

This article piece will explain exactly why execution is all about the humility of continuous learning NOT merely the process of generating ideas. Humility because it involves the honest truth about making decisions on whether to continue, adjust or stop pursuing an idea in the face of evidence. Remember no amount of VC money will save a bad product, so don’t bank on it.

I encourage people almost daily to think about what they love doing outside of work and the transition needed in in order to go all in on that. The problem I find is that people get so caught up with a video they watched or a book they read on starting a business. What happens is that you end up focusing way too much on producing the output e.g. completing a business plan, when really you should be thinking about the big picture by asking yourself “what is the outcome I am trying to achieve?” then working backwards from the outcome to decide the appropriate tools to use. I am not the most academically gifted but where I excel is that I am a big picture thinker focused on long term legacy not the short term buzz. This is why I document my experiences and demystify generic advice we regularly hear on how to start a startup or business.

We all know that if we have great ideas that lack execution the ideas are worthless. That isn’t rocket science. I remember starting my first business Mixtape Madness and growing an online community of over 100,000 users (since I exited they have exceeded 1 million +), not many congratulated me despite the fact my side project grew into a business. However when I spent 6 months in Silicon Valley last year, failed entrepreneurs were getting congratulated for failing. WTF?!

I thought succeeding was the goal? At the core of the problem is misaligned definitions. The true definition of failure in this instance is actually learning your experiment has indicated you should kill your idea sooner rather than later to save time, money and effort. Costly examples include the likes of Boo.com who raised over ￡100m+ in Venture Capital to provide online retail. They spent money recklessly on advertising, ignored their target audience and failed to execute on a good idea. Now their legacy is attached to the dot com bubble.

Execution means different things to different people. An engineer may think writing code is execution, people who don’t know how to code could think setting up their social media profiles is execution. Tommy who just finished university may print business cards, buy a domain and design a logo, but that is not execution. None of these are execution but rather examples of The Build Trap. Melissa Perri describes The Build Trap as when we jump into build mode, with a lack of information on how our users will respond to these products, whether they value the product, or if we have even solved a problem. Our development and design decisions are not based on fact, but on our best guesses. Most of those guesses are wrong sadly.

Execution is about continuous learning. It is simply about learning what people want, and continuously addressing your assumptions to close the gap between what you identify as a problem and the actual problem customers want solved. All of your favourite products from Spotify and Netflix to your hair brush or cooking pot all solve a specific problem. Netflix solves the problem of watching ad-free movies and TV shows on-demand at your convenience across devices. Your hair brush solves the problem of sorting out your messy hair to make it presentable.

One of the biggest difficulties when starting a new business is that the risk is not solely on whether you can execute on your idea but the fact that sometimes you don’t even know what the market is. Take AI and Machine Learning, it is hard to say how big the market will be or how fast it will grow as both industries are both still at a stage of infancy. For this reason writing a business plan for the next 5 years of the business is not a worthwhile exercise as the level of certainty of what year 5 looks like is below 20% and merely a guess. The value to be honest is not in whether or not we can build the product, but rather whether or not we should. 

The best piece of advice I was given was to ‘get out of the building’ and speak to as many prospective customers as possible. For existing products, owners should get into the cadence of speaking to customers early and often. Ultimately you are building a solution for others and not just yourself which is why it is important to involve customers in design and development.

The art of continuous learning

Step 1 & 2: Customer discovery & validation questions to answer:

• Who are my customers? 
• What are their needs? 
• Does my solution meet my customers need?

If the result of these questions reveal you may have been wrong, e.g. wrong target user then you need to go back to step 1 to think differently about your assumptions and possibly test your solution with a different customer segment. Continuous learning is vital to achieving product/ market fit (PMF), as the answers to these questions will eventually lead to a product that fits with the market you are targeting.

Even when PMF is achieved, although the focus of the business becomes primarily to grow fast, continuous learning is still core to achieving success. For example, if I want to expand my app to India as I scale, I should aim to learn about things such as:

• How many leads does my company have in India?
• Who are the major competitors there?
• What are the top 3 handsets that customers use (insight into screen resolution, size and handsets to carry out testing on)?
• What are internet speeds in different regions?
• Can I speak to customers or use a company to help conduct research on the ground to learn about native habits and behaviours?

A recent example is Dominos Pizza. In 2010 they were a pizza company on the brink of bankruptcy. Last year Dominos made nearly $5bn in digital sales from pivoting their business model to become a software business. Continuous learning was core to this digital transformation as they have spent time engaging with customers, improving their pizzas and customer service. 

Ok, so where do you start?

Don’t start here!

I encounter so many people in jobs, frustrated reading The Lean Startup and with good intentions taking the first step to build, then putting analytics in place with the hope of learning something eventually. This is a classic route to The Build Trap. As an aspiring entrepreneur there is another loop you should be starting with. After all, if your goal is validated learnings then the first step should be to determine exactly what it is we want to learn. Tristan Kromer shares the Hypothesis, Metrics, Experiment (HME) loop, which is centred around figuring out what exactly we are trying to learn from our experiment. The three steps are as follows:

1. Establish a hypothesis
2. Determine a quantitative or qualitative method to evaluate that hypothesis
3. Build an experiment to test that hypothesis

The HME loop helps to avoid The Build Trap because the hypothesis stage provides a specific aim/ purpose for building. At step 3 you are aware of what you aim to learn, and should pick the quickest and easiest test to carry out in order to obtain your learning objective. This could simply be a user interview, a user test with sketches drawn on paper or even build a basic landing page instead of spending months developing a product in isolation. Kickstarter is a great example of how many creatives test the appetite from users for their product. People post a video and share a short story so consumers can visualise the value proposition and the problem the product solves. The Pebble Watch is an example of this. You can check out my last article on Happy Plugs for a more detailed example of an MVP.

For me the hardest thing about execution is actually ‘getting started’. Have an honest reflection on yourself to ask how passionate you are about solving the problem your idea addresses. This is important because if you are not passionate about it, you will not be determined enough to address your assumptions, continuously learn and execute on your idea. Self-awareness comes first!

In summary the 3 steps to follow in order to execute are:

1. Self-Awareness: Figure out what you love doing outside of your day job (during your evenings and weekends) and double down on that!
2. HME: Remember if your experiment disproves your hypothesis, this is not failure! it is an opportunity that reveals what doesn’t work
3. BML: Building isn’t always the answer immediately, but when you do build, ensure you continuously learn whether your solution fits your target customer

So what is execution? This article highlighted the value of execution is learning continuously and building iteratively in small increments.

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Thank you for reading!