Lessons From the School of Hard Knocks - Principles (Part 1)

Being a startup founder is unlike most skills, there is no school or course that you can do that will sufficiently prepare you to build, grow, and scale a successful startup business.

The one and only school that has consistently given the experience necessary to survive is the age-old School of Hard Knocks. For those newer founders reading this, I’ll summarize some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned, many of which may contrast with the popular VC canon that often emerges from Silicon Valley.?

Disclaimer: The approaches I’ve tried are in the context of my market, healthtech in Africa.?

This brings me to my first and probably most valuable lesson of the past five years…

1) NOT All Startup Advice is Created Equal?

My journey into entrepreneurship and startup life started with a lot of the typical startup canon. I’ve read them all, Zero to One - by Peter Theil, Blitzscaling - Reid Hoffmann, The Lean Startup - Eric Ries, you name it. I consumed it.?

My rationale was that anything that I needed to know was already included in the experience of those that have been there before. Now I agree, where possible you want to learn from the mistakes of others, after all first hand experience is the most expensive.?

That being said, for someone that is building a startup in Africa, there are a number of things that are assumed to be in place in the world of Silicon Valley but don’t exist or simply don't work in an African context.?

Whether it’s the availability of smartphones, cheap internet, being able to collect payments easily, or the availability of credit / venture capital, there are the things that are implicitly assumed. When those assumptions are absent they could kill your startup without close attention.?

So while it is useful to take startup advice from the successful founders, I’d say look to founders who’ve done it in environments that are closer to home.?

Increasingly I’ve been looking East to China and India’s tech entrepreneurs. Their environments seem much closer to what we face in Africa.

2) Sell First

I’ve mentioned before that Selling First is one of the best pieces of business advice I’ve ever received. Sales cures all problems.?

As a startup entrepreneur, the act of sales gives you everything that you need. If you are selling, then you quickly learn what part of the value proposition resonates with clients and what doesn’t, if you manage to sell you get the capital that you need to iterate on your product, and finally it focuses the mind on delivering results for your clients.?

On the odd days when I wake up feeling overwhelmed by what you need to do next, I’ve found it a very useful exercise to clear my calendar and write down a list of prospects and start reaching out to make a sale.

Getting prospects, finding clients and doing deals is what business is all about. You’ll never regret making a sale.?

3) Don’t build anything if you can help it

This is probably one of the more controversial opinions that I have.?

How can a tech founder not build tech?

What I’ve found is that a lot of the time spent developing is actually a waste of time because you’re building something that doesn’t actually move the needle.?

The worst feeling ever (and I’ve experienced it many times) is building something that nobody wants or needs.?

It has a double negative effect, firstly it wastes your limited resources and time, secondly it gives you sunk costs that cloud your judgment.

It’s much better to sell food to the hungry than try and sell snow to an eskimo.?

So when coupled with selling first, you focus all of your energy on building something that your customers are willing to pay for, making your business much more viable over the long term.

In my next article, I’ll dive into some of the other important lessons that I’ve learned from building a healthcare technology business in Africa.

My hope is that these lessons spare you a little bit of heartache or at a minimum give you a heads up on the types of challenges that you’ll face.