One of the biggest start-up mistakes: Not going ALL IN

I have worked with more than 200 start-ups and the one thing that the handful of successful start-ups have in common is that:

They aren’t scared to get their hands dirty, and go all in. They aren’t afraid to do the hard, often boring, difficult, “dirty” work.

But you’ll be surprised how many founders don’t show up properly, and only give their start-up a half-baked effort.?

For early stage start-ups, going all in doesn’t mean burning your bridges by quitting your job and cashing in your retirement savings. It just means giving it your absolute best.

So why do so many founders fail to go all in?

In my experience there are two main reasons: Fear and Not being motivated enough

1) Fear

These people would ‘rather be stuck than screwed'. They play it safe with a few little things on the side but never go all in, due to:

• ?Fear of making a mistake: This fear is often disguised as perfectionism. Founders have a deeply-rooted terror that their product is not good enough.
• Fear of rejection: They are scared of the word ‘no’.
• Fear of failure: They aren’t fully convinced of the business idea and are scared of failing

These founders will play it safe, making excuses like, ‘I don’t have the funding’ or ‘I just don’t have the time’, or ‘I don’t know how to code an app’.

2) Not motivated enough

These people may have brilliant ideas, but are simply not willing to put in the hours because they are:

• Lazy: They didn’t think it would be this hard. They wanted a 'get rich quick' scheme. They wanted fame and fortune without the hard work. Without getting their hands dirty.
• Not passionate/motivated enough: They don't feel passionate about the business or the problem they are solving. Buildings?business isn’t burning a hole in their soul.

Let’s explore the first reason founders don’t go all in:

1) Entrepreneurs don’t go all in because they are … SCARED

The fear of rejection leads to perfectionism… and then procrastination

You know that feeling when you’ve crafted a really important blog post and now have to press post? Your trembling finger hovers over the button before you chicken out, and spend yet another hour doing a fifth and final read-through….and then you tell yourself you just want to make it a bit better, and don’t send it today. While you are making it ‘perfect’ the fear grows: fear of nasty comments, fear of people spotting grammar mistakes, fear of people laughing at your work.

?hen, when you finally post the blog, the reality is that no one replies, and you’re kind of disappointed, thinking: ‘I would’ve actually liked one comment, even if it wasn’t great.’

I’ve been here. I used to be so scared of publishing an article or a new course that I protected myself from rejection by trying to make everything perfect first. And this is what happened…

We've often heard the saying; perfectionism is another form of procrastination.

I’ve seen so many founders stall because they’re too scared to put their ideas, prototype, website or social media page out there. It will never be perfect. In fact that is the point, you will always be testing, tweaking, and improving your business, and the only way to do that is to identify the flaws and what can be improved as early on as possible.

“Perfectionism is not a way to avoid shame, perfectionism is a form of shame.” - Brene Brown

Good entrepreneurs are comfortable with putting?‘light’ or ‘minimum’ versions of their products or services out there to get feedback and see if they are moving in the right direction?before building the full version.

Netflorist success story

Netflorist, South Africa’s largest same-day gift service and winner of numerous e-commerce awards,?had no intention of starting an online flower shop. They quickly built and launched a basic front-end website for Valentine's day in 1999, purely as an experiment, to prove to Makro that they could design and run an e-commerce site.?

“Our plan was to run the site for one day to prove that we could do it. And then we got R30 000 worth of orders. That was the equivalent of a whole month’s revenue at a flower shop.” - Ryan Bacher, co-founder of Netflorist.

When the test site did unbelievably well, they decided not to shut it off, and perfected and refined it from there.

“What’s really crazy is that people were paying for us to provide a service. We had no stock and knew nothing about flowers. We just sent the orders to a flower shop in Sandton,” said Ryan Bacher to Entrepreneur Magazine.

In order to stop the endless pursuit of perfectionism, we need to learn to face our fear of rejection. Arguably, no one has done this better than entrepreneur and speaker, Jia Jiang.

The Fear of Rejection

In Jia Jang’s book, ‘Rejection Proof’, Jia tells the story of how he was terrified of rejection and how he became rejection proof. In a process called ‘Rejection Therapy’ he documents his journey to get rejected at least once a day for 100 days. The idea of ‘Rejection Therapy’ is that you seek rejection, so that you become de-sensitised to it.??

He started a blog and a Youtube channel (initially with 0 followers), to document his rejections, and he set himself some intimidating tasks like:

• ?Borrow $100 from a stranger
• Walk into a random neighbour’s garden and ask if you can plant a flower in their yard

He found that, surprisingly, people were mostly open to his requests if he didn’t run away embarrassed by the initial rejection. Once he explained ‘why’ he wanted something people were actually helpful, and their initial rejection was not personal. For example, the neighbour explained that he didn’t want flowers in his yard because his dog chewed them up, but mentioned that the lady down the street loved flowers. So Jia Jiang was able to plant the flower in her garden, much to her delight, and he completed his challenge.??

In one of his most famous ‘dares’ he asked the manager of Krispy Kreme to make him special doughnuts to look like the olympic symbol, and all within 15 minutes. He thought they would laugh him out the door, but to his surprise, they actually fulfilled his request and specially made the doughnuts to form the five interlocking olympic rings and iced them in the olympic colours.?And the most amazing thing was that the manager, Jackie, gave him the doughnuts for free - this video is heart-warming and shows that there are good people out there. It now has more than 6,000,000 views on Jian Jiang’s Youtube Channel.

WATCH his TEDTalk here.

?What Jia Jang learned about rejection was:

• Rejection won’t kill you. What’s the worst that can happen? We’re wired to avoid rejection because in the stone age rejection from the tribe could literally mean death, but not anymore.
• Rejection is a muscle. If you don’t constantly step outside of your comfort zone, you’ll become weak and timid
• ?Rejection is a numbers game. Fight through enough NOs you’ll eventually get a YES
• ?When people discourage you it might be a sign you’re ahead of the pack. Galileo’s idea that the earth revolves around the sun;?Apple’s first tablet computer in 1993;?JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. These ideas were all initially met with NO’s. But they were all revolutionary! Rejection is often a sign you’re onto something important.

?Remember:

• Rejection is often only the opinion of the rejector. It isn’t necessarily a fact of life. If you asked a different person, or the same person at a different time, the answer might have been positive
• Separate your idea from your self: Hold the problem tightly, but the solution loosely
• If you get a no, ask why? Treat rejection as feedback. Learn a lesson
• Always do your best

If a person who fears rejection was suddenly not afraid anymore, what might they be capable of?

And now for the second point

2) The entrepreneur does not go all in because they are…Not motivated enough?

There are a lot of people who want to become entrepreneurs because they think it is glamorous, and they think they will?‘get rich quick’.?

They are in for a surprise.

When I work with entrepreneurs to help them flesh out their business models, most of them want to know how long the process will take. My answer is: “It takes as long as you take. If you are ready to meet every day, then we can meet every day. You are the pace setter and you are the bottleneck. If you don’t put effort into ‘getting out of the building’ and interacting with customers and stakeholders, it will take very long, and your business model will be built on sand.”

The unfortunate reality is that a big number of entrepreneurs just stay stuck, because they are either fearful of giving it their all, or just plain disinterested in finding out the truth about their customer.

So, if they come and put in 50% of the effort, I will only put in 1% more. They must be the driving force. I can’t be the driving force in their business.

To these entrepreneurs: If you think it will take ten hours to do something, multiply that by another ten. You can bet you’ll have to invest 10 x more energy, resources, time and capital than you initially think.?

So, ask yourself: “Am I willing to do the hard work? Do I care enough about this problem to give it my best?” It’s better to park an idea until you find something that inspires the necessary passion and energy for the problem.

?And if the answer is “YES”, do the hard work. GO ALL IN.

?As long as you are taking action, you aren’t failing.

?As Martin Luther King said: “You don’t have to see the whole staircase. You just need to take the first step.”