No wifi, no startups, no unicorns
What do our grandparents understand from the startup world? What can an elderly man selling fruit on the local noisy food market know about UX? How can a hairdresser, mother of three living next door, become a successful startup founder?
Startup world seems to be governed by its magic internal rules. If you don’t upvote on Product Hunt each day, don’t plan your tweets just for the first half an hour after your target readers wake up, and don’t follow the latest trends, you simply can’t win. The next unicorn is the one founded by a person who pitches everywhere, posts 3 times a day on LinkedIn to overlap with major timezones, and is in a hurry going from a meetup to some conference to present their product. This is a person who on YouTube feed gets a mix of Y Combinator, TechCrunch and Entrepreneur.
The essential ingredient for business success isn’t wifi.
Business is to make money, no matter if a person does it online or offline. The same essential business knowledge applies to both worlds. Long-term happy runners are those who can be trusted and know the meaning of hard work. Look around, TED speakers surround you.
Find time to live offline, this way you can positively change the online map. So many of us seem not to notice the startup founders and mentors in people around. Their business had nothing to do with wifi. They even haven’t travelled to the S valley. You won’t find hundreds of retweets about their overnight success story. Despite all of that, they are wealthy of knowledge how to run a successful company that people love.
Sure, you have to translate the ideas and human experiences for your success. Just find online in offline, find out how to convert it into lines of code and awesome designs. Solve the problem which hasn’t been well solved yet.
Marry a problem or analyze the one that you’ve already married. Try to figure out the solution. Put your character to it. Add offline inspiration and observation flavors. Mix with online possibilities. Listen to people and iterate. Make a business human.
Copying is easy, but copying is no fun. Getting inspired is powerful. There are no ready answers for those who want to make a dent. Life is all about Experience, not about unicorns, horses, or donkeys. Business is human. It’s person to person, not company to company. Inspiration travels from an eye to an eye, from human mouth to human ear, from a man to a man. Online is so exciting, yet offline makes the whole difference.
Each business starts. Offline business owners are great at creating MVP, yet they haven’t seen LEAN caption on any book. The more the product expresses the unique voice, the more eternal the brand becomes. The more human the brand is, with bigger excitement people talk about it among their friends.
Value useful over cool. Value created over copied. Value experience over fuss. Explore offline to create online. Have your measure of success and human will to share it with others. All that's long-lasting grows organically.
Once upon a time there was no Internet, there were donkeys, people, and hard work. Success existed long before a man painted the first unicorn image. Then came the Internet and made so many things easier. Yet what is valuable in human relations hasn’t changed.
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