Validation Trepidation: Don’t Be Afraid to Do Something. Anything!
Every day we look at entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These are people who have changed the face of retail and are taking people to the moon. Each entrepreneur-in-training sees these faces and thinks, “how will I change the world?” Venture capitalists look for billion dollar ideas, everyone is looking for the next Unicorn company. This focus is continuously pressed by people like Peter Thiel, demanding that incremental improvement isn’t enough:
“Companies must strive for [building products] 10x better because merely incremental improvements often end up meaning no improvement at all for the end user…Only when your product is 10x better can you offer the customer transparent superiority.” Peter Thiel in Zero to One
While it is true that we need visionary leaders to invent the future, we often lose sight of the need for pure, unadulterated, unfettered simplicity. So often, entrepreneurs-in-training are trying to learn the ropes, figure out how they’ll make their own mark on the world. At the same time, they’re wondering, “how am I supposed to pass my classes AND invent the future of artificial intelligence?” We’ve all been there, right?
A friend of mine articulated this obstacle perfectly as justification for creating a hammock business: “I got tired of trying to come up with innovative ideas and business models and decided to just start something a lot of people are already doing to get my self out of the ideation phase and start taking some risks.”
You shouldn’t have to feel obligated to invent the future in order to start doing something, anything. Approaches to entrepreneurship like the lean startup are built around the ability to just get out and do something, anything.
In Shoe Dog, Phil Knight remembers the words of his coach. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.” The cowards never started. The first, and key step in becoming an innovator is simply to start.
Over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to teach an introductory entrepreneurship class. One of the ideas that was tested in the class is called PumpPay, an idea to help bridge the gap for gas stations in bringing more of their gas-pumping customers into the store to buy the higher-margin items inside. Over the course of the semester, they had conducted surveys to better understand their customers and their needs. My assignment to them was to test this idea.
After a few weeks, I sat down with some of them to check in on their progress. “We’ve invalidated our idea.” I assumed they were referring to the results of their experiment and was interested in the results. “No,” they said, “we didn’t conduct the experiment. We identified holes in our idea that invalidated it.”
These students were experiencing what my friend with the hammock business had kept running into: validation trepidation. This is where we poke holes in our own ideas, seeing all the flaws that, in reality, will exist in any early idea. As we identify those holes, we talk ourselves out of the idea, and we move on with our lives.
While I empathized with these students, I still established the expectation that they needed to conduct an experiment. “If I had an extra 30 minutes, we could go down to a gas station right now and ask people if they would buy something from us.” After another week, we met and discussed their experience. I encouraged them, saying that even if no one had bought a single thing, the learning would still be valuable. Instead of a total letdown, turns out they did pretty well.
“We bought a box with Snickers bars and approached people filling up their cars. We were able to sell all of our inventory in less than 30 minutes.”
The lean startup approach pushes you to design an MVP, which is defined as the minimum version of a product that still generates validated learning. In other words, you should create something as close to the actual experience as possible, and ask a customer to engage. Don’t hypothesize with the customer about what they might do if they had such-and-such a product. Make something close, then watch and learn.
The famous philosopher, Mike Tyson, once said, “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face.” In entrepreneurship, your first interaction with a customer will often be a punch to the face. But you will learn more from that than any theoretical experience in any class you could take. Don’t fall victim to validation trepidation. Get out of your own head, get out of the building, talk to people, sell something, build something. Do anything!
Too often, we idolize those who succeed and shun those who try and fail. But in reality, the most important components of entrepreneurship include the ability to fail, learn, and pivot. The build-measure-learn loop is a repetitive face-smash into a wall without the learn component.
Recently, I’ve been advising a social venture called Edu-Cell. They provide text-based supplementary educational material for kids in Ghana. They found a partner who had already developed the SMS technology they needed. A lot of people would tell them to build the technology; that they could never change the world riding the coattails of someone else’s tech. But in a business like this, the ability to develop telecom relationships, and effectively sell to educational organizations is just as important of a component as the technology. So, in line with lean startup methodology, they can circumvent the significant up-front costs of building the tech, spend time selling and distributing existing tech, and then when they’ve learned more than they ever could have from googling stuff, they’ll be ready to build more effective technology than they ever could have without that experience.
Whether it is people’s expectations, or standards, or fears, these are all symptoms of validation trepidation. Getting outside of your comfort zone and doing something will lead to more valuable learning than anything you could think up in your head, or read online. Even if your MVP is a patchwork solution of Google Sheets and Asana, you’ll still learn more when you’re forced to watch as someone interacts with something you built.
