Agility: A Timeless Business Practice
If cash is oxygen, then practicality and the art of the pivot are your left and right lungs.
We’ve heard it before: 9 out of 10 startups fail within x amount of years.
While the statistic itself is questionable, it points to a dreary truth in the startup scene — launching a business and keeping it running is dumb hard.
Blame it on the toxic workplace culture. Blame it on the competition. Blame it on the lack of innovation initiatives in place to push the company forward. Blame it on millennials not having children.
But above all else, blame your failed startup on a lack of agility.
Now I know what you’re thinking.
“…Agility? Really?…”
Yes, really.
Entrepreneurship requires an innate duality between ‘head in the clouds’ and ‘feet on the ground.’ You have to have larger aspirations for the business — that Northstar your ship is sailing towards — while simultaneously doing all the little things that will get your ship to that destination.
“Be stubborn on the long-term vision but flexible on the details” — Jeff Bezos, CEO & Founder of Amazon
Of course, striking that balance is easier said than done.
More often than not, people new to running a business tend to romanticize the idea of the business itself rather than testing for product market fit. They think the next unicorn is sitting among their thoughts, waiting to pop out with a Starbucks and a dash of hustle. They fantasize about making their dreams a reality, but they don’t get feedback.
They don’t actually validate that their idea is a good one. Consider this Medium post your wakeup call.
The Art of the Pivot
If you haven’t yet gotten a chance to read the Lean Startup by Eric Reis, Amazon is just a tab away..
If I were to summarize the 21st century startup bible however, it would go a little something like this…
The only way to truly know if someone is willing to buy your product, is if they buy it.
To that extent, you don’t want to embark on a two year journey building out your product before you know someone is willing to whip out their credit card for it. You don’t even want to spend a month on it.
You want to validate that “this idea makes money,” and you want to do it now.
The Minimal Viable Product
Consider the case of Zappos, an example highlighted in the Lean Startup. In 1999, back when selling items online wasn’t already the norm, Nick Swinmurn was getting frustrated with his inability to find the pair of shoes he was looking for at the mall. After pitching the idea to his friends and family, who concluded that no one would want to purchase sneakers digitally because they couldn’t try them on first, he decided to build out an MVP (minimal viable product — the bare minimum needed to convey an idea) to prove them wrong.
As a proof of concept, Swinmurn made his way back to the shoe stores armed with a camera and a dream. He photographed the shoes on display, and uploaded them back home on his website. When his first, second, third customers started to purchase from the site, he then ran back to the store, purchased the shoe, and scrambled to package and deliver them quickly.
Of course this wasn’t a scalable method of doing business — but, it was a proof of concept. By repeating the process hundreds of times, Swinmurn was able to perfect the process without much damage done to his own wallet, all the while learning which styles seemed to sell best and optimizing his business according to the consumer.
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
– Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn
Screw Being a Ninja
Now, I know that working ‘in stealth’ has become a popular trend for the thousands of startups popping up every day, but the truth is you want to do exactly the opposite if you’re new to the game.
There’s a wave of entrepreneurs worrying that their ideas will get stolen if they go around sharing it, but realistically, with the sheer amount of time, energy and motivation it takes to build a startup, most people would rather work on their own ideas (assuming they work on anything at all).
Sharing your ideas is how you get feedback, and feedback is how you improve.
When you get feedback you don’t want to hear — something that goes against one of your assumptions (remember: everything in business is an assumption until you test it) — you pivot.
“Like the basketball maneuver of the same name, in which a player keeps one foot planted while changing direction with the other foot, a pivot occurs when a start-up tests a new direction while still keeping one metaphorical foot in the original business” — Jason Del Ray, Inc.
Much like the advice to spend your time earning money at a conventional job, and work on your startups after hours to scale it up before switching to it full-time: you have to stay realistic for your business to succeed.
You have to have passion without the romance.
Romance is Dead
The only person who will tell you your baby is ugly is your thinning wallet.
But your baby is ugly. And your customers think so too.
Entrepreneurship means killing your darlings, or in this case, your ego. It means being iterative, which means giving the customer what they want, not what you want them to want.
You get the point?
To Conclude
I chose to write this piece in a conversational manner to communicate the key principles I want to convey the way people want to read it. Admittedly, much of the post only scratches the surface of what it means to do good business or be an entrepreneur, but as exhaustive as this topic can be my aim with this piece was to set people on the right track — to stop pondering and to start failing fast, learning, and trying again. Agility is about being quick on your feet, much like the pacing of this article.
In business (and in life), when something doesn’t go your way, do you try to change the external conditions that limit your success, or change your internal perspective and the approaches you take on what those limitations mean for you first?
While having an unwavering goal in mind is critical to making progress, you should remain flexible in how you approach that goal. And remember:
“Reading is good, action is better”
- Eric Ries, the Lean Startup
