Entrepreneurs — Meet the person responsible for the downfall of most small businesses
He thinks about her all day, forgets to eat, she wakes him up at night, makes him stay up late. She is there every instant with him.
She obsesses him, makes him want to move mountains, he talks about her to everyone, all the time, often getting on his friends or family’s nerves.
He only sees her strong points, imagine a great and long lasting future with her.
It is not his girlfriend, wife or lover (even if..). Since he’s become an entrepreneur, what makes him so infatuated is Ms Solution. She represents what he’s building or selling, what his business delivers.
Some see it as passion and commitment, others obsession.
He tells himself that being an entrepreneur means always thinking about how to improve, do better, bigger, more tech, more profitable…
We all become entrepreneurs because we have an idea. Revolutionary or plain simple but that we consider worth building.
It’s the passion for this idea that supports us through difficult times and allows us to start and take risks. At that’s a good thing.
Entrepreneurs are often blind sighted by this fervour, like a guy in love only sees the qualities of his new woman.
Like this business owner, who wants so badly to help a certain group of people with his solution, that he forgets that this target would never pay for it and that those who could pay, have other requirements or constraints (if they have a need at all).
Or this other startupper who thinks her project is misunderstood by investors, because ‘it’s very niche’ and who is convinced she needs to deploy 100% of her solution, with all possible features before starting to look at adoption and churn in her community.
A lot can be said about investors, but, like the rest of the entrepreneurial eco-system, they force the often narrowly sighted entrepreneur to adopt a broader viewpoint — at least at the beginning, when the owner is a stronger believer in Ms Solution, still has time and cash (the honeymoon period experienced in relationships).
It is often the passion they have for their idea, its potential, the good or benefit that it can deliver that makes them so blind sighted. Love and the fear of failure.
Because thinking about failing is often an unbearable exercise and yet, it is so useful.
It is the love of this idea that sinks most businesses or turns them into still-born projects.
Because the only thing that truly matters are the clients, those who pay. Not the products or those who use it freely. And many forget it.
Because for many years the model was: build a great thing then try to see who could buy it or evangelise the population most likely to embrace it.
And for many years, it worked. Companies manufactured needs and customers came, often attracted by mass market marketing, boasting the product’s benefits.
And it still works if you are l’Oréal, Microsoft or Unilever because they still have enough cash to finance several years of R&D (even if this is now changing as many blue chip embrace Lean Startup internally), followed by targeted and cross-media marketing campaigns.
It can also work if you are working on a very disruptive innovation but 99% of businesses are not and don’t have deep enough pockets.
It does NOT work if you are starting out business, where every day is part of the countdown until the day where you run out of cash to finance your project or even pay your bills.
In this case, loving the solution — like Ash Maurya says — is really a problem.
Why?
Because, by loving the solution, you will, like many of the entrepreneurs I meet, spend far too much time:
- Building your app or website, even if currently the only people who are willing to pay for it are you or your buddy.
- Launching a great online training with a membership site, despite the fact that you have no list, little interactions with your target or haven’t even delivered any training IRL.
- Fine-tuning your website and signature, when you don’t even have clients yet.
- Spend weeks improving your offer because you have the most kick ass tech or the greatest idea for an additional service when you don’t even have clients yet. And particularly if you have no clients, it’s a great way to use all of that free time. And the more features you’ll have, the more you’ll expect instant success.
All of this is natural, when in love. You want to spend most of your time with your loved one.
Except, there is a fundamental flaw in this: without clients, your project will die. And its speed of death will depend on how long it takes you to get out of the building and confront your business to its potential market.
There is a solution. Many successful entrepreneurs understood this. Not always the first time, often after a few mishaps and slow death.
The solution: ditch Ms Solution or become polygamous.
This implies deciding to focus on serving your clients, your target and to identify what they want, what keeps them up at night, what painful issues they currently have unresolved or for which the current solution doesn’t work so well. And that applies building your solution according to your clients and not you.
Yeah, right, obviously. That’s what I did you’re going to tell me.
Possibly, but probably still with the objective to please Love #1 (Ms Solution) and not to satisfy your target. Or at least not well enough.
In this polygamy model, it’s useful to define a pecking order between customers and Ms Solution.
I often meet aspiring entrepreneurs, new startups, freelancers or corporate entrepreneurs.
They are fully committed to what they are building or deliver, but when I try to understand what customer problem they are trying to solve (in the Lean Startup sense), it quickly becomes unclear or my question is discounted as weird, not ‘modern’ or open minded enough.
Some will have identified a need, even done a small survey (often not very methodically) but few resist to the calling of Ms Solution and most avoid to think too much about the product/market fit.
Like this entrepreneur who, well aware that he needed to validate his product, interviewed his prospects with such enthusiasm, that most of his respondents, contaminated with his positive energy, started feeling a need that wasn’t there to start off with. And if they saw flaws in his value proposition, didn’t dare to shatter the dream of such a positive and friendly entrepreneur.
And yet, what will kill your idea is precisely the fact that no one was given the opportunity to challenge or damage it.
But why do we all do this?
Because it’s really hard to stop this creative surge, to stop building, pausing to take stock.
Because it is not that simple to design a process to test our business assumptions.
And most of all, because taking the risk to talk to your target and hence to hear that they don’t have a good enough problem that needs solving, it’s just not fun at all, particularly when you’re just getting started.
So the majority prefers not validating that their product is really worth building and goes for the ‘let’s launch and see’ option. In general what they see, with some exceptions, it that there is nothing to see.
And sometimes, it takes them months to realise that nothing will ever happen.
Meanwhile, cash is burning, morale is sinking and, at some point, they have to admit that they bet on the wrong girl.
Taking the time to document and define your business model and getting into your customer’s head is a huge investment but it has a great ROI and ROT.
In a few weeks, talking to your potential clients, you will know if your current idea is worth developing, whether it makes sense to start building your app, your service or your website. You will have started to learn who are your true clients and what drives them.
Or, you will know that you need to pivot because the original assumptions were not valid. Not cool, I know, but way more effective than watching your brilliant idea (and your cash) die a slow death.
I have personally tested Ash Maurya “Running Lean” approach.
Like everyone, I thought my idea was awesome. Based on my experience, I had identified a need and had millions of ideas on how to implement. I almost went with it and started building a landing page, setting up sales call etc…
Almost.
I had gone that route the previous year on an online course project and I realised that, even when you’re a subject matter expert, you’re don’t live in people’s head. So I decided to use the Lean Canvas and the whole method to validate my assumptions.
It was also fun for me, who originally comes from market research, to use some of my old skills in my new business.
I had 3 assumptions around entrepreneurs’ isolation, their lack of constructive feedback causing them to loose the big picture and their needs for specific soft skills training, adapted to small businesses.
Within 2 weeks, I interviewed 10 people in my original target.
And just these 10 interviews (of about 1h, by phone) allowed me to validate my assumptions. All agreed with the pain points but all also had good enough solutions, many free.
Within 2 weeks, I had buried my solution, before having had the chance to fall in love with it.
The only investment made was my time. No website, no ads. Just interviews.
This process also allowed me to segment the originally too broad target further. I saved time, money and collected great information, allowing me to better position my business.
This approach is scary because it makes you face failure. The rejection of our beloved idea, solution. It is unpleasant to realise that your idea doesn’t interest anyone.
But honestly, when you have an open wound that hurts (no traction, no clients), would you rather see a surgeon and put up with stitches for a while or go the ‘it will be fine’ route and end up with gangrene?
Sometimes, you need to have gone through amputation to acknowledge the benefits of surgery.
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Originally published in French in Medium France
Who is Alexia — I work with entrepreneurs or freelancers who want to quickly find their market or get out of a dead end.
