My brother is an old soul and likes to say “Stick to your knitting.” But for an entrepreneur, that can be dangerous advice – maybe for you? Because you LOVE to come up with a gazillion new ideas don’t you?
However, maybe he’s still not too far off. Your risk goes down when you have a laser-like focus. Risk goes up when we hear the 10,000 problems that a Founder/CEO sees they are solving with their business idea. A new distribution plan, all-new packaging materials, a new way to purchase, a new this, and a new that. And lo and behold, 18 months later, that entrepreneur looks in the mirror and finds out that none of those things got across the finish line, bupkis.
Said another way: a mentor of mine talked about an inventor that had a furniture polish that could also be a skin-lotion and that could also be a cooking oil. How on earth do you build a brand or message around this everything-goo?
You need to choose. Which means you need to say ‘no’ to things.
If you want to go off the deep end and learn the science behind your entrepreneurial discernment, look through this Gradworks piece from the Fielding graduate University Ph.D, Clifford Guin: http://gradworks.umi.com/35/03/3503420.html
Or, if you want to be in the deeper end, Ecclesiastes 3.1 “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven”
Or…you can simply understand the genius behind the mechanics of being STAGE APPROPRIATE with your decisions. The Kauffman Foundation’s paper on the Entrepreneur’s Journey identifies 6 stages, I submit that Stage 4 is a frequent explosion in most plans (http://startupweekend.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/12/SW-White-Paper-Entrepreneurs-Journey.pdf)
- Do you have a clear problem, one that you’re addressing?
- Are you focused on a repeatable and scalable business model? Do you really understand what that entails?
- This is where failure often resides, you are testing a hypothesized solution that the market may reject. Overly complicate this process and you won’t have specific lessons that you can apply to your next market test.
Keep it simple, know your market, be decisive and be in a constant state of learning from your market. They have 7 seconds to make their decision, so you can’t be all-that and a bag of chips, just one really good solution for one of their illusive needs.
And to motivate you, watch your valuation and investor participation soar.
Build well