Reflect: What has been your most valuable lesson while building your startup?
Hey you!
You already know that reflecting is very important to maintain awareness of what you actually do and to avoid making the same mistakes again. Therefore I would like to give you the best opportunity for today to actually think about your previous journey as a startup founder / indiehacker.
Think about this:
-What was your most valuable lesson you have learned?
-Whats the biggest mistake you've made?
-What has had the most impact on your success or failure?
Take 5 deep breathes and start consciously think about that. If you want to give me and all the others an opportunity to learn from your experience then feel free to write it down in a comment. I will reply to each answer! :-)
It's much easier to sell ice cream on a beach, than an ice skating rink.
I've read about the important of product market fit many times, but I didn't really get it until I tried the same idea for different niches. When you hit something good, doing business is easy. Struggling with a weak idea in the wrong market is emotionally and financially draining. Test different variations of your ideas to find a market where it resonates.
A website is not a business.
In my younger days, I spent a lot of time as a wantrepreneur (designing logos, business cards, websites, writing business plans, coming up with ideas) and not enough on just building a MVP and getting customers. A real businesses get sales. I can still improve on this.
No one fails forever.
I've had a lot of business duds, but I've also had some modest successes. It's important to keep showing up everyday. Yes, it's a cliche, but so few follow through. How many bloggers make it past 6 months? How many podcasts get past 10 episodes? How many young startups get their first customer? The number is very low because the vast majority give up way too soon.
Wow John! That was super inspirational and honestly... I kinda relate to some things that you have mentioned. Looking back I have been a Wantrepreneur for the last 1,5 years but now I’m slowly starting to get aware of it while trying to change. When and how did you make the transition to the entrepreneur version of yourself? What was the most important step you had to do in order to change ?
Regarding your last paragraph: what do you think might be the reason why many people stop at the 10th time of writing a blog, finding a customer, etc. curious to hear your opinion.:-)
Thanks for your great comment! I really appreciate your effort and hope that it was helpful to you as well;)
Cheers,
Jorim
Hi,
For me, it was putting all my money into a new business about 20 years ago. I quit my job and had no choice but to make it work. That was a good lesson for me. Before that, I mostly pretended to be an entrepreneur.
People give up too soon because it is hard. It's hard writing blog posts when no one is reading. It's hard to make sales calls when you keep getting rejected. It's what Steven Pressfield calls the resistance. We work on making a pretty website instead of sales calls. We put weeks into crafting the perfect name and logo, instead of going out and getting business.
It can be difficult to know if the idea is weak or whether it's just poor execution. For most people, I think it's a lack of effort. That has certainly been my problem in the past. I'm getting better though!
Uclusion learned that early adopters are their own market. So unless you are a Trello or Notion.so which can be used by a single person you have to consider the use cases and finding of early adopters independently of your long term market.
https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/starting-sales talks some about techniques for finding low risk early adopters.
Its interesting to hear about the difference between early adopters and mainstream users. How did you learn to you make sure that you are not building a product for an early adopter niche rather than for the actual mainstream User which you have targeted in the first place ?
Excellent question. I think lean startup as many people are practicing it encourages exactly falling into that trap. Uclusion also risks that problem as its earliest adopter is ourselves. Even reading about early Slack they talk about having to change the product as larger teams adopted it.
Maybe there is no way to avoid over engineering for early adopters. You just have to be prepared to work your way out of it when you are past the initial market.