Your Plan is Wrong

I find this to be an interesting problem too, that your plan just ends up being wrong all the time. And the example I use from Patreon is that we were really sure that the way that would make us unique as a platform is that we would allow artists, because we believe that new influencers nowadays weren't sort of locked into this album release cycle, and so they would release content whenever it made sense for them. So we were convinced and had really strong conviction that what needed to exist on this platform is the ability to only charge when you release a new song, a new album, a new piece of art. And so that was the crux of our value proposition with Patreon. And it turns out after we launched, even though that's how we launched, artists cared much more about a stable revenue stream where they would have consistent money come in every month and so they could actually think about planning for their finances and a career, which makes a lot of sense. But this sort of situation, I find, yeah, eventually we had like 95% of artists just doing sort of a monthly payment plan instead of per song or per work. And I found in just talking to a lot of different folks, that this seems to always happen too. So I was back in, I don't know what this was 2010, I guess, working at this incubator called Dogpatch Labs. And this was the same incubator where across the table, both Kevin Sisham, who I think is gonna be doing the last talk in this series, was working and building out Instagram, but actually at the time, still using all the Bourbon branding and stuff, because that was the first company that they had been working on. And so I remember I was like, curious about all the other groups working around me. So I got set up on Instagram with Mike, Kevin's co founder. And then I asked Kevin, like, what do you. I'm curious, you know, what's your plan? What are you thinking about with this company? And at the time, and this was, I think, as they were pivoting out of Bourbon, what he described was a Instagram is just going to be easier to use than all the other photo services. But their strategy was that it would be the first pillar as part of a lifestyle suite of apps that could encompass different things. And so this one was about sharing images, your life, they could have a location oriented one down the road. And it turns out that Instagram was compelling enough where none of that other planning had to materialize at all for them. And then they went on from there. Same thing happened with, well, similar thing where early on, I had met Ben Silverman, who is the founder of Pinterest, and we were doing a few strategy sessions because this is before he had launched Pinterest on just things that we were building. We were both trying to come up with startup things at that time. And the original demo that he showed me prior to Pinterest was actually a mobile app that allowed you to sort of group different fashion together and then eventually purchase different clothes and things like that. And so Ben is an amazing strategic thinker based on the experience of my conversations with him in the past. But the point of all this is like, I think you just get going. You, if you allow every single time that you're proven wrong on the planning that you have laid out, you're almost guaranteed to run into this. And so if you can develop the mentality that it's not a big deal and that you have conviction on some core principle of what you're working on, it's okay for your plan to be absolutely wrong. It also helps in these cases that I think the folks found success afterwards. But even in the case where you have to pivot or do something different, I think just being comfortable with the fact that more likely than not, you can't anticipate the mentality of groups of people is what everyone ends up facing, regardless of how successful they are down the road.