Quick snippets from my morning read on Tuesday, 18th May 2021
The pandemic saw the rise of many business, some have grown to become large scale enterprises while others are still steadily growing while have inevitably come to an end. In today’s morning, we share 4 of the 6 lessons from a failed pandemic business
My first failed attempt as an entrepreneur was at the end of my senior year of college, and at the very start of the covid-19 pandemic. These statistics only reaffirm my belief that I’m not out of the count yet.
Looking back, there is so much I would have done differently during my first startup attempt. My main lessons learned will be covered in this article, as I hope they can help anyone with an entrepreneurial mindset to increase their odds of realizing their dreams.
1. Read More Books
While there is nothing that beats direct startup experience, books are the best way to increase your probability of a successful venture. The great news about books in the startup space is that you can be light years ahead of the crowd after reading only a dozen or so. A short list of books that have had the most profound impact on my entrepreneurial mindset include:
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- The Startup Owner’s Manual by Bob Dorf & Steve Blank
- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
2. Bring a Healthy Appetite for Risk
To give context, my initial startup attempt was through an entrepreneurial capstone at my university. The other option was to be assigned a capstone project from a local company that paired with the college. I thought to myself, I’ve got my whole life to build projects for other people. Why wouldn’t I take this chance to build something for myself?
And while it’s incredibly rare to launch a successful startup in your 20’s — I believed there was no better time to take on the challenge than when my risk was obfuscated as a campus class.
3. Do NOT Start a Company With Your Friends
Within the first few weeks of the entrepreneurial capstone, we were instructed to form teams of 2–4 people with an idea we could pursue through the academic school year. Our instructors repeatedly and strongly advised us to not work with our friends, and to aim for only two people for our startups.
What did I do? I joined a team of 4 with my friends.
Initially, I thought to myself that we would be able to accomplish so much more than if I were to pair with a single stranger. We knew each other well, and the extra numbers were sure to increase our output, right? Wrong.
It can be brutally difficult to treat your friends in a different manner within the startup as compared to how your friendship normally operates. A serious request to meet more often can easily be shirked off from someone who is already comfortable in your presence, you have to be much more authoritative to change the behavior of your friends — and that’s just not fun for anyone.
While it’s not impossible to start a company with a friend, it definitely can be a gamble. Make sure you find an individual who compliments your weaknesses with their strengths. At the end of the day, your cofounders are even more influential than the founding idea itself.
5.Feedback Loops Are Worth Their Weight in Gold
The growth of a startup is heavily weighted on how fast you can hone in on a product or service that the market wants. When you first start piloting an idea, there is a very high chance that your initial attempt is garbage. Your goal as the entrepreneur is not to spread your self proclaimed breakthrough, it’s to constantly prove to yourself and to others that you are a little less wrong than you were before.
Feedback loops accomplish this goal through empathy interviews and rapid prototyping. Empathy interviews consist of you taking the time to sit with someone you could see using your product. You are NOT meant to discuss your idea during an empathy interview, instead you want to make clear the positive and negative emotions of individuals within the context of the problem you are trying to solve.
Read the rest of the article here.
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