Entrepreneurship: Letting Yourself Fly
Let me share some lessons I have learned in my path. I attended several entrepreneurship courses and workshops, generated my share of business plans, sketched a few product vision boards and canvases, but most importantly, I started several projects. The outcome: I succeeded and failed at the same time. I succeeded because I learned many lessons, always assumed the apprentice point of view when faced with different challenges, and failed because I did not achieve my financial goals, but hey…best-paid lessons I could learn. That is why I wrote these few lines; maybe I can share my lessons learned, which may help you figure some problems out beforehand.
Disclaimer: as with other lessons learned, these were gained through hands-on experience in projects. They may not be lessons that give value to everybody else, but maybe they are not that hard on the eyes either.
Do not have fear of sharing your idea in case someone else takes it from you
The idea has no value by itself; overcoming blockers and gaining experience is what generates value. To make any product work, you and your team must spend time on it, thinking, discussing, learning, executing, and so on. The strengths that your team and you bring to the table are the core values that the product has. Keep in mind that each individual in the team has their strengths; those were achieved by learning and hands-on working, which by itself has great value and not just the idea. So next time you are enlightened by a great idea, bear in mind that other people might have thought about it already (currently, we are above 8 billion people in the world; for sure, someone else thought about it), so don’t be afraid to share it. Instead, try to validate it with others and find out how you can improve it by receiving feedback. Remember that to reach your market, you need to truly understand what are the pains that they are having; your goal is to try to resolve this in a better way.
Avoid tunnel vision: you are generating a product for someone else
Whenever we find the next billion-dollar idea, we try to justify its purpose and try to adapt it so everyone becomes as in love with it as we are. I believe that not allowing and truly challenging your idea blocks you from creating an even greater product. I understand this as tunnel vision, and I learned its downside when treating patients as a veterinarian. Sometimes, you believe your idea is the best one, you think about it from every possible angle, and even your gut tells you that is the way to go: tunnel vision. And you may be correct several times, but it won’t harm you to listen to other people’s points of view, even better if they have experience in the same field. Think about it: if you are on the right track, you can keep going in that same direction, but maybe, if you find out there is something else you can work towards, it is an even better lesson.
If you are working as a team, let yourselves have at least one divergent / brainstorming session; you can find more information researching Design Thinking. For doing so, an analogy may be thinking about it as improved acting; it is creative, out-of-the-box thinking where you have to avoid shutting down ideas and add on whatever direction this session is going. Just like improved acting, you don’t know where this is going, and that is okay, most of the magic occurs while everyone is flowing with the session. Don’t worry if the ideas become bigger and bigger and even far away from financial reality or any kind of reality. In the next session, you and your team will work in a convergent phase. In that phase, you will start trimming and grouping the ideas into initiatives and relating them with your client’s pains and needs, generating a roadmap, and maybe even defining the first epics to work on. It is almost impossible to think outside the box if the team is tied to the floor by what seems to be the right idea: trust in your teammates’ innovative minds and experience in the field.
Being innovative is not only to create something never seen before
There is innovation in understanding how you can do better at resolving problems that users/clients have. Have you ever got an idea that it seemed a great opportunity, and you did research and found out someone is doing the same thing? That is not bad; there are different stages in the Product life cycle, and each phase has its opportunities and challenges. If you are convinced of your idea, knowing about the competition is the best thing to do. By this, I mean: are they attending the market segment that I thought of? What clients/users' necessities are they aiming for? What are the strengths and weaknesses that we have about theirs? Competition is great; it makes us work harder and get stronger, and we can learn from our mistakes and those that others have made, so try to think of this as a great opportunity. Sometimes, being the only one doing something new (or maybe believing it so) has some downsides; the market segment you aim for may be small and hard to reach.
When researching for competition, it is better to research direct and indirect competitors. For example, if I am willing to build an amusement park, my direct competitors are other amusement parks, and my indirect competitors are cinemas, theatres, or any other entertainment activity.
Which is the best framework to use?
When defining a working methodology to work with, remember that most of what you can find are frameworks. Use the parts that work for you, and try to avoid sticking too much to them if it doesn’t feel right. Agile frameworks provide structure but are not intended to be used strictly. There are way too many agile frameworks; don’t panic if you don’t know them all. Rest assured that the one thing they all have in common is that they all honor Agile values and principles. So instead of worrying about applying them by the book, use them as good practices; your goal should not be to earn a badge for using Scrum perfectly for example, the goal is to create and deliver iterations of the product that give value to clients/users while doing it iteratively. Having an Agile mindset will benefit the client (your focus is to add value to the product on every iteration) and you and your team great benefits (an Agile mindset works on trust in the team; each individual is there to add strengths to the team). Thinking agile means focusing on adding value and, in a way, celebrating mistakes as learning opportunities. As you deliver value and validate it with the clients/users in every iteration, you and your team will realize it fast and correct it whenever you get off track with the clients/users' needs. If you are working in teams, it also focuses on the importance of team dynamics. With each iteration, you should check what you are delivering and how your team works. In Scrum, these celebrations are called Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective.
One of the key aspects of an entrepreneur is the constant need to learn
I believe that the greatest entrepreneurship university of all is hands-on experience and the determination to learn from it. Most of the time, when creating something, you will learn by making mistakes, adapting to the situations, turning the fear of not achieving a goal into an engine for motivation, and feeling comfortable in the uncomfortableness. It is important to manage your expectations on working the product. It is key to understand that the motivation behind working on something new should not be exclusively financial; it has to honor some core values of your own to thrive when things get challenging. If you are working on a team, try to set up meetings to discover which values you share and validate how you work together. By having these meetings and using effective communication, you will generate trustful and lasting relations within your team, which will help you set and reach goals. Knowing your key values is crucial to honoring them while working on your product; consciously and unconsciously, your threshold for being frustrated will be lowered, and you will always know where your North is at.
Being SMART in for setting goals
Being SMART is not just about the meaning of the word but understanding the acronym embedded in it. Being SMART is setting Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based goals. If you are running a 10k, you better know where the goal is; if not, how can you know when you arrive there? By setting goals in this manner, you and your team will organize better because everyone understands what is expected of their work, and by sharing the idea that what they are working on adds value to the goal of the product. If you are working alone, setting SMART goals will help you focus on one task at a time. Multitasking is the fastest way to lose time, so it is better to timebox and set up the output you want to achieve in the time assigned the task.
Making a product vision board or a canvas and business plan will help you to track whether things are going right or wrong
When you start working on an idea, a good approach is to begin by designing a Product Vision Board or a Product Canvas. Using this approach will help you and your team think about different areas and how to relate them; it will become a core documentation of your product and let you define the Mission and Vision of your creation. Once you have a defined Product Vision, you should start working on a Business Plan, I know that sometimes it is a heavy burden, but it is key to control your product and identify alerts whenever things are getting out of control. A solid Business Plan includes an executive summary, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), competition analysis (direct and indirect competition), Product Roadmap, Financial Plan (Forecast for at least 3 years), and an ROI (Return Of Investment) Analysis. You can find plenty of information and templates on how to generate this documentation; feel free to contact me if you need any assistance.
To sum up
Build your confidence, set achievable goals, make a financial forecast (it is better to know if things don’t grow and how this will impact you), and always have a learning mindset. Things won’t go wrong if your focus is on learning from experience and how to work to implement your lessons learned next time. On the other hand, success is a mystery that only you should define; if the opinions of others define your success, you will never make it (haters gonna hate). It is better to work on the definition of what success means to you. Is it financial? Be objective and define goals and KPIs; is it achieving something great and changing the world? Okay, define the meaning of great and who or how many people in the world you want to reach with your product. Those are just examples, I invite you to do this exercise regularly; it will help you keep going, update goals, or set new ones. Try not to stress financially what you are generating. When you start something, give it time to grow. Maybe you can work with it in your extra time while working in your job and not fully depend financially on it. Time will give you the experience, and the experience will make you all and the products you are working on even greater.
I wish you all the best, I hope you find the courage and strength to believe in yourself and fly by creating something you love and enjoy doing.
