False Starts

This is probably the number one killer of early stage startups I call false start. So as we do this conversation, we're in the middle of the Olympics, so we're familiar with false starts and swimming and track and field. You jump the gun in an effort to get an edge. And lots of entrepreneurs do exactly that. They basically start building and selling their thing, because that's what entrepreneurs do, right? Bias for action, passion burning bright, sort of a conviction. They found the right problem solution pair and what they've done is they've skipped a whole bunch of upfront research, what your colleague Steve Blank would call the customer discovery phase, where you're basically exploring the problem, figuring out if you've found a problem worth solving. And then they've skipped the phase of generating lots of potential solutions, which is what a designer, user experience designer would do, and narrowing that big set of solutions down to the most promising one through prototype testing and getting user feedback and so forth. And so this is not work that needs to take a year. You can probably do this stuff in four weeks for many entrepreneurs, but in the interest of saving those four weeks, these folks have plunged straight in. And essentially the odds that the first version of the product, when you do that, is going to hit the mark, are low and might take you four months to build it, figure out how to sell it, see that it's not working, and figure out what to do next. So in order to save four weeks and just get going, you've wasted four months. And if you've only got a year's worth of money in the bank, like my founders I mentioned at the beginning, that really boosts your failure odds.