5 Things I’ve learned about being a young entrepreneur in Ireland
1 What you end up doing will not be what you started doing
The art of the pivot. “Pivot” has become of a bit of a buzzword. It’s trendy to pivot, but for good reason. One thing you must learn early on as an entrepreneur is that you DO NOT know what your customer wants — your customer knows what they want. It’s only by talking to your customer and adapting your product to best fit their needs that you can be sure to build a successful product. To misquote an old phrase — build it and they will not come. You don’t want to lock yourself away building a product, only to find out months or years later that nobody actually wants it. From day one ensure your development is agile and lean enough to be able to turn on a dime. With each iteration of your product — test it, get feedback, and adjust accordingly. Pivoting is healthy!
2 Get a good designer on board early
As a young startup you will be meeting a lot of people whether they are advisors, people who work in the industry, or potential investors. It is so important to have something tangible to show these people and to sell your vision. Do not wait to have a finished product to show them. Get a designer to make some very polished mockups of your website/product/app and use a service such as InVision to make a prototype of your product. Nobody cares that it doesn’t actually work or that there’s nothing behind it. A lot of the time, investors will not be tech savvy and actually won’t be able to tell the difference between a prototype and a functional app. Whatever you do, don’t go into these meetings empty handed. All you want from these people is validation (or better yet — investment) then the product will come.
p.s. this step is a lot easier if you know how to use photoshop
3 Make the tough calls
We found ourselves very early on questioning different strategies to take for our company. However, we were too indecisive in making the tough decisions of scrapping certain ideas, or pursuing challenging paths to market because all of us felt we lacked the industry experience to have enough confidence in our doubts. We would often find that a few weeks later an advisor from the industry would confirm that what we were doing wouldn’t work, and we were after wasting weeks of humming and hawing over what to do rather than making the tough call early. Be decisive. Your co-founders can trust you. Most of the time if you break problems down using logic and rationale you will come to the right conclusion. You will make mistakes along the way but that’s fine and these will be few in number. Trust yourself. Make the call.
4 At the end of the day, you have to sell something
Despite what some companies may think, you can’t be a startup forever. At some point you need to break the circle of constantly looking for more funding and more validation. At the end of the day you need to make a business, and a business needs to sell something. Get your product out early and try charge someone for it, even if it’s only a small amount. Making money is a really good habit to get into. Once you get your big clients coming in the future you want to be practised and experienced in invoicing and have your processes for taking money as frictionless as possible, so start doing this early. Your first invoice is your most important one. Don’t underestimate the power of knowing that at least one person is willing to part with their money to use your product or service. That’s all the validation you need and after that it’s just scaling.
5 Get out of your office
Ireland has a vibrant startup scene at the moment. There are lots of really talented and enthusiastic people working here for large tech companies and they are all really willing to help. I found it so encouraging when we were starting off just how many people with full time jobs were willing to take time out of their day to meet for a coffee and provide really in depth advice and discussions about our product. Their only motivation for this is their good will. People like meeting new startups and want to see them succeed — they were probably in your shoes not too long ago. Don’t be afraid to chance the arm and email people because more times than not you will get a reply. You will learn so much more by getting out of your office and meeting people who work in the industry than just sitting behind your computer screen all day and trying to figure everything out. There are people out there who know a lot more about your industry than you do. Meet them!
Dylan — Founder @ MatchDay
