So… You Built Your Startup Backwards — Now What?
5 steps you can take to help overcome the most common mistake in entrepreneurship
Within a few hours of publishing an article called Are You Building Your Startup Backwards?, I gave a lecture about “the fundamentals of entrepreneurship” to a group of graduate students. The TL:DR of the article is that most entrepreneurs create products before establishing a market, and that’s… well… bad.
After I’d finished my lecture, a student approached me with a question. He and his co-founders had developed an augmented reality app, and he wanted advice for how to find customers.
Sigh… it was yet-another founder who’d built his startup backwards. So, as I’d done in my article, I explained the problem with creating a product before you know who your customer is or know how to access them. I told him he should have identified his customers before he built anything. And I even sent him a link to the article I’d just published. Then I went on my way.
As I mentally congratulated myself for imparting valuable wisdom to a young entrepreneur, I began thinking that something didn’t feel right. Yes, the things I wrote in that article and the things I told the entrepreneur are all true. And yes, I stand by them. But just because they’re accurate doesn’t…
