My side hustle diary Vol 1: False assumptions

Gbade Adewole
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

For anyone who knows me, my entrepreneurial career has thus far been a lot of great ideas with potential but with no tangible results months down the line. This is not to say that I have just sat on my ass and done nothing about them. Usually, I do extensive research and planning only to eventually find out that I will have to learn some type of code, download a Udemy course for said code, find out it is too generalised for what I am trying to achieve, get confused/bored and finally get distracted by a new “shinier” idea. Wash, rinse, repeat.

After months of investigation into why this continues to happen, I have come to the conclusion that I may have been subscribing to a few semi delusional mantras:

  1. Build it and they will come
  2. Find the right market opportunity by trying to “dissect” industries
  3. Be “creative” and try and formulate radical new ideas the world has never seen before

These I would say are not total crap from the outset, in fact the seem fairly reasonable. Build it and they will come especially sounds like a wise aphorism once touted by a Vanderbilt esque industrialist as he described how the railroads were built. However, what I would say is that they most likely fall short of the truth especially when you take things out of business strategy “speak” and just apply some common sense to it. For instance, what if you build something that people simply don’t want? or even worse, something that people find genuinely offensive? What if you over build? What if you under build? It’s the equivalent to painting a portrait of a person without ever seeing them…a waste of time.

Similarly, I would say that trying to dissect an industry sounds very smart. Jeff Bezos famously founded Amazon after seeing the exponential growth of the internet and deciding that he was going to seize his opportunity by creating an online bookstore that gave its users universal selection. I would however say that the key problem with this (unless you possess a Bezozian level of intellect/sagacity) is that it often leads you to creating problems out of thin air (insert example of failed dot com startup here).

Finally, be creative is the hardest one for me to shake as I love dreaming of new possibilities. I also reject the notion of “there is nothing new under the sun”, it’s a cop-out for unimaginative people. We can point out to Apple and Steve Jobs for being the flag bearers for creativity in tech, but again unless you possess a that unique Steve jobs esque eye for the consumer’s inner thoughts then you are likely to be sidetracked. My issue with this again is that is kind of does the same things as the mantra above, leads to the creation of problems in order to make the creativity “work”. The result usually rhymes with the ‘Build it and they will come’ philosophy as you might end up doing something wildly creative, but then end up living as a starving artist.

What these should be replaced with is a single mantra, validate.

Before building anything, you should figure out if people actually care about what you are building. Create a simple landing page, post it on a forum see if it gets any feedback. If it does get feedback then great, if it doesn’t then at least you can’t say that you weren’t warned!

So yeah, this is my plan to turn over a new entrepreneurial leaf. I will be chronicling my attempts to implement this new style of building, sharing the good, the bad and a whole lot of ugly.

Stay tuned for my next article, where I will discuss my first MVP AllBillsinc