Now you built a company that handles so much capacity, from field knowledge, to troubleshooting, to air fleet management, you would have a huge audience that is accessible, and your own travel agencies, no middle man, you can get to a point to predict flights, and you can get to cut down the costs of travel up to 60% then beating every single airline in your country.

It may take you up to 15 to 20 years, to achieve this. But hey, you would be a real godfather of airline hence then.

Building capacity is the way you should think.

I hear many startups trying to “go viral” or “acquire users” or “give services/product for free” or “launch kickstarter” campaign.

You build your capacity not only to increase your valuation, but to be able to pivot easily, change business model from a time to another,

Any step that you are trying to take, makes sense if it will help you build initial capacity, that will enable you later on to move forward and test different directions.

Capacity (Some call it competitive advantage, or barrier to entry) is the thing that should be as lasting as possible.

Model your your business as a system, a space shuttle with multiple engines.

And your purpose is to make sure that that system grows, and grows when you fuel it each time.

is the fuel: users? revenues? technology? partnerships? acquisition channels? employees? special skills? raising capital? or many of these at the same time.

Bootstrapping is the simple art of building capacity incrementally with the few resources at hand.

There is a little guideline made by Steve Blank on the topic of measuring the readiness for investment.

http://steveblank.com/2013/11/25/its-time-to-play-moneyball-the-investment-readiness-level/

You can get inspired from it to understand your readiness for hiring, acquiring users, partnering, etc..

Most of startups lack “understanding of the market”, or “technological skills”, or partners and network, and they should try to redefine the way their startup engine is designed, and how does it fit the market.

addendum: On The Myth of Failure

All around the startup communities, and in the modern startup culture, failure is over praised in a neo-pagan way.

For those inexperienced, failure looks cool and a pride.

The point is not failure, as a third time entrepreneur, with a maths and engineering background. The thing that people try to call failure is simply “Error”

• We make compilation errors all the time to build a program.
• We get stuck while proving a theorem all the time, till we find a way out.
• When writing, we revise the style and mistakes each time.

But we don't call them failures, we call them mistakes. Its a normal process, its the cycle of Life itself.

We call this process “trail/error” and it is essential to figure out “what works and what doesn’t work” and then being able to prove it with data.

“Trial and Error” helps you to “Learn”, and when you Learn a mistake, you try not repeating it again. When you know this you try to get body of knowledge from books, blogs, and advice, so you don’t do a 3 months mistake that can take your 1 hour of reading.

Most startups I have advised and met, and even myself when I started, I was always starting with wrong assumptions, accumulating them and adopting them without testing them. So if I could test that mistake early on, I could have avoided 2 months of work into a 30 minutes experiment.

Accumulating assumptions come from a lack of confidence to face reality by experimenting, that is also backed by a praise of the ego that thinks he knows everything. this paradoxical feelings and emotions is the first enemy of the entrepreneur. Impatience and Arrogance are two great ways to make you go through the wall.

If you can’t learn from your mistakes, or even admit them, being impatience and arrogance. No matter how many times you fail, you are just getting down and down.

Failure or Mistakes are not the key of learning and moving forward, they are just fact of life that shows us how much we are weak.

The true nature to success is called perseverance, not failure, perceverant people are always winning, its the ability to build immunity against pain, and take punches, and move forward.

Sweat dries, Blood clots, Bones Heal, suck it up and move forward.
Not only for resisting the pain through mistakes and errors, perseverance is also the ability to push further limits when you are succeeding. Sometimes with little wins, people stop and take a long nap, perseverance is that ability to be ready to accept a defeat after winning, only by this you can get another win.

A lesson without pain is meaningless. For you cannot gain anything without sacrificing something else in return, but once you have overcome it and made it your own…you will gain an irreplaceable fullmetal heart.

Full Metal Alchemist

**** THIS POST IS NOT COMPLETE YET, IT IS STILL IN PROGRESS ****

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