Worrying about the chicken soup when you haven’t even caught the chicken?
Stop worrying about hypothetical problems your startup might have in the future, specially if you haven’t even started building a prototype.
I have worked on many web startups over the last five years and lately have been sharing some lessons learned talking at events in Central America at countries like Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Costa Rica.
A weird question I have been asked by first time wannabe entrepreneurs during the Q&A section of the talks or on follow-up skype chats goes something like this:
“I have a great startup idea… but I haven’t started working on it because I am afraid that when I launch and make a lot of money then criminals will go after me, hurt me or my family and ask for ransom. How do you do it?”
To what I usually answer:
“Dude, you are worrying too much about something that might not even happen… I mean, making a lot of money is probably not going to happen to you at your first attempt at building a startup.
Even if your product or service is successful, making money with it will be an organic process… by the time you are making real money you can hire private security, buy a bullet proof car if you want, or even leave the country and go live in the US or Europe. Anyway, those are not things to worry about nor excuses to blame on why you have not started working on your great idea.”
One of my business partners once stopped us all while discussing about what would happen if a user uploaded a copyrighted photo to our service and then we would get sued… we were considering not to allow photos to be uploaded just because of that… but it was a photo centric product. He just stopped us and said “Let’s not discuss about the chicken soup if we haven’t even caught the chicken yet”.
He was right…. we were working on a prototype. When we launched the product, we didn’t get more than a few hundred photos uploaded, all crappy and none copyrighted, not even enough users or activity to call the product successful… so why where we even worrying about this “great problem to have”?
I believe that wantrepreneurs tend to worry or bring up these hypothetical problems just as excuses, most times unconsciently, because they really don’t want or are too afraid to start doing some actual work and turn their idea into a reality (prototype at least). So they create these excuses just to justify to themselves why they don’t do it, they don’t want to accept that they really don’t want to work on it or are too afraid of failure, so much that even trying is too much risk.
