I get knocked down, but I get up again
Kyle Balmer
?? AI entrepreneurship || RISEN? prompt framework || International AI trainer || 60k newsletter readers || 8x best sellers || 200k audience || Forbes featured || Great eyebrows
“I get knocked down, but I get up again”
This took me a while. And was pretty painful!
But here’s a roll-call of my businesses.
Honestly there are more - but I got tired of going through old website domain lists!
I also, as anyone who knows me will attest to, have a terrible chronological memory!
You get the idea though.
Lots and lots. And lots. Of failures.
And a tiny handful of successes.
This is the norm. It’s just most entrepreneurs don’t talk about it out loud.
Here’s my favourite @levelsio tweet:
Talk to any entrepreneur and they’ll have a similar list.
The problem is that what most aspiring entrepreneurs see are the?successes.
Basically survivorship bias - the only people you see left standing (and who have a big enough platform to be heard) are those who made it.
Just remember that their “overnight success” is generally years and years of complete disasters.
What about you?
Here’s a question -?how many?businesses have you tried to launch?
Zero? One? Two? Three? Four?
If so - it’s not enough.
You need volume.
Most (nay, all?) early businesses will flop.
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And why wouldn’t they? You’ve not done it before!
Learning to do a backflip. Do you expect to land it first time? No.
Learning Spanish. Expect that first time ordering empenadas to go smoothly? No
But with business we for some reason have the expectation that the first idea, the first implementation, the first time is going to work. Nonsense.
Instead we, as entrepreneurs, need to keep stepping up to bat. It’s about gaining the?skill of?building a business as well as building the business.
Does that mean to learn, learn, learn first? Nope. Knowledge without action doesn’t build skill.
It means we need to build our first businesses as learning projects. We can hope but don’t?expect?them to hit immediately.
And we make sure that if they fail the failure doesn’t end our entrepreneurial dreams. We make sure that the failure is fast, small, cheap and doesn’t mentally hurt us. This will be what we’re covering this week.
If you are starting your first business (or simply a new idea to add to an ongoing concern) let’s use this prompt with your idea:
I’ll run this prompt with “selling custom jewellery”. It gives me 5 steps.
The first for example is:
Notice that this step requires no cash and very little time.
And there’s a distinct success/failure metric.
This allows us to?test?our business idea without going all in, spending money, building a team, designing a logo and all the other silly things people do when starting a business.
It’s this sort of focus on the?trappings of a business (logo, business cards, business plan, fundraising, renting an office etc.) that makes business failure catastrophic.
Instead if we build step by step, testing and validating as we go we can keep each “failure” small and controllable.
We’ll get into more details about this in the next Part.
For now run the prompt with your business idea to get a set of sensible deployment steps.
This originally featured in my free daily AI Entrepreneur emails.
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