Scott Duffy on: The Fastest Way To Lose Your First Million

Hey, this is Scott Duffy. You know, a couple weeks ago, I ran into a friend of mine and I wanted to share the story with you. I've known him forever. Awesome guy, super smart businessman. And he had raised. Last time I ran into, it was about two years ago, he raised $2 million to launch a new consumer Internet company. And that's a lot of money in today's market. And I was really excited for him. We high five. I congratulated him. And then again, two years later, about a week ago, I ran into him again and I asked him, I said, how's it going? And he said, terrible. He said, in fact, I think what we're going to have to do is shut the company down. I said, what the hell happened? And he said, this is what we did. He said, we started with this one simple idea, this one simple thing that we were going to build, but along the way, our friends, our family, people on our team, he said, I blame myself. We all came up with all these new ideas and things to add to the product. And I call that, by the way, shiny ball syndrome. It's like you see a shiny ball, shiny ball, and you attach it to what it is you're trying to develop. He said, as a result, we just kept building and we never got anything out there. And he said when we finally did get something out there, we learned a really important lesson. 95% of our users only used 5% of what we built. He said we had wasted 95% of our time and money on something that we couldn't use. So my message to you today is this, is to focus on one thing. Not the hardest thing, the simplest thing, the minimum viable product, and get it out there quickly. Get feedback from customers as soon as you can, and decide what to build next based on what they tell you, not what you think, but based on what they tell you. If you do that, I can assure you, you will set yourself off on a path to success. And for more, come check us out@scottduffy.com have an awesome day.