Entrepreneurs ditch your armbands
Jason Calcanis has a great post today on entrepreneurship.A couple of items stuck out for me.
“As an entrepreneur you have to follow your nose and don’t worry if you dump or change your original model. Evolution is the revolution”
“Just start…. it’s all about starting”
I couldn’t agree more, I see more and more entrepreneurs talking themselves out of launching, overdoing market research, taking too much time to launch and then regretting someone else getting out the door before them.
Take twitterfone for example.
1. Idea
2. design
3. execution
4.Launch
7 weeks later its out the door.
Loic followed up on Jason’s post with “just throw entrepreneurs in the water they will learn how to swim” which gave me the idea for this post.
“There are so many would be entrepreneurs who never do it just because they never try. And when you start, chances are high you do not crack the code of what you are trying to do at the beginning. It takes time and we all make mistakes. In fact, it is in the entrepreneurs daily life to make mistakes”
So basically just get stuck in, take your chance, gather your users, does your product solve a problem
if the answer to all of the above is yes then its time to jump in the pool, its sink or swim time.
Chances are 30% of you are world class swimmers.
Pat, I agree with both Jason and Loic. I am taking the risk at my age to do a start-up, with no experience, and I am just going along the “wave.” Lets see how this comes out
Reading Richard Branson’s book at the moment called “Screw it, Lets do it!” which pretty much says the same thing. Starting is the hard part, get going and apologise afterwards.
The book is in Waterstones in Cork for 10 Euro, an enjoyable read so far.
“He who dares wins.”
Great inspirational advice.
Starting is just the first step.
Throughout any project, especially long term ones, it’s easy to loose faith in the project, the market, or even in your own ability.
I’m in the middle of a couple of projects right now and I’d be lying if I said I’ve haven’t had second thoughts at one point or another.
I think the real challenge is to finish. To get it complete and out the door. To bring your idea from that initial spark and the first burst excitement all the way through the four step process you outlined above and to see it deliver it’s promises in a way that makes people think they’re using something really worthwhile.
Starting is great, but finishing and launching is a far more satisfying step (at least I hope it is!) because it’s way too easy to give up along the way.
Pat, I couldn’t agree more. The best advice one receives as an aspiring writer is “Write!” The same is true of almost any endeavor. I’ve found innumerable excuses over the years not to put an idea into practice. I’ve let depression and fear of failure keep me out of “the game”.
That has changed recently. My only issue now is that I have no idea how one secures startup funding for a venture. The way I figure it, just start it and offers will come when there’s something worth investing in. I’ve got a dozen projects in the works, but I’m focusing on one or two initially. So I hope Jason, Loic, and yourself are right.
I love twitterfone! Maybe someday you can release the details of it’s startup history as an entrepreneurial how-to? Keep up the great work!
Couldn’t agree more Pat. We got a half-finished coClarity out to a small number of beta-customers about two months ago and the real-user feedback has been invaluable. Some features we thought were really cool were not used. In many cases, some simple features we’d deprioritised made a big difference. Kawasaki’s Art of the Start discusses this approach in some detail.