Assuming your way through a startup: When, why and how to challenge your own status quo
A founder that did not talk with any potential customer is not a founder, but is a dreamer.
Lots of people believe they have a great idea, without putting any effort into even researching whether or not it has been done before. There should be no attention paid to those people who haven’t spoken to a single customer before patting themselves on the back for their amazing inspiration. It might be that their idea was already built two years ago. They have not admit to themselves that they have no differentiator to bring to the market. And when there is no differentiation, making people pay you for the service or product becomes an almost impossible task. You have to be developing something that can connect with the people you are creating for, and invite them to step through your door be it physical or digital. This cannot be done from the comfort of your corner office.
The importance of assumption testing should not be ignored as it is only with constant customer feedback that we can create products truly fit for a market. The job of entrepreneurial support units is to make sure their start-ups are diligent in their customer discovery process and push their founders to think twice about what they think is right and will work. The truth is that most of the time we do not know what is right or wrong. Since innovation is the process of going through with an idea all the way to its fruition, we can infer that most of that work comes from implementation rather than invention.
Paul Graham shares in one of his essays that “When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world.” The world is not static and people have to have an undying belief in the concept of change. After all, Heraclitus the Greek philosopher has been quoted as saying “change is the only constant in life.”
Mark Wilson, University of Rochester professor and co-founder of the Pre-Seed Workshop — one of the world’s earliest “pre-accelerator” bootcamps dedicated to hard-science startups, says that this realization “takes us away from the Eureka moment mindset and brings us to the reality: 99% of all innovation is incremental ideas, very little is a radical breakthrough.” He goes on to describe what he coined as “innovation creed”. Before getting into any details about any ideas, this largely-missing part of entrepreneurial support and education asks why a founder is doing what they are doing and how are they going to measure success. The drivers behind why people do the things they do helps us analyze the biases they are bringing to the table, what “kinds” of ideas are right for them, and which pathways forward are most appropriate. His personas include the Wannabe Tycoon, the Simple Proprietor, the Hopeless Humanitarian, the Perpetual Hobbyist, the Mad Scientist, the Flipper, the Lucky Licensor, and the Panicked Executive.
Many programs rush out to help everyone along a “Wannabe Tycoon” pathway when this is quite in conflict with the priorities and actions for someone wanting to be a “Simple Proprietor”. The reason behind why people do the things they do helps us analyze the biases they are bringing to the table. Programs need to aid founders in assessing the “why” early on in the innovation process to make sure the major drivers are understood.
It is not always assumptions about the business model that can kill a project, but sometimes is the assumptions about the technology that prevent an idea from succeeding. Ben Gilbert, co-founder of not one but two start-up studios, Madrona Venture Labs and Pioneer Square Labs, shared a great story to back this point up. At PSL, they try to do one or two projects that are really out there in terms of technical risk. One of their ideas came after one of the employees read a paper about a new means of accessing RAM that a software wouldn’t normally have access to and make the bits flip. They thought they could build and market a system where a piece of software would be running on machines and measure how many bits flip in an attempt to analyze radiation levels in the surroundings.
They went ahead and hired a well-known PhD researcher to work on this problem with them and figured out that they were right, high levels of radiation would make those bits flip, but so would small variations in temperature. They had built a software that was able to recognize mostly nothing and provide very little value to the end consumer. This story has a happy ending though: the researcher ended up staying with the studio which granted them one of the world’s best experts in machine learning. This allowed them to spin out three machine learning start-ups that performed very well because they got access to incredible talent at an early stage.
There seems to be this inflexibility and rigidity of thought in terms of product development that characterizes entrepreneurs who fail at innovation. It’s easy to dream about all the cool and amazing things we could be doing, but way harder to take the time and energy to put those things to the test and allow change to happen.
The rule is simple:
“If the final product you end up developing is the exact same as your original idea, you are wrong.”
Successful product development is characterized by constant iteration due to the convergence of different perspectives. We are required to constantly capture information from the market in order to challenge our ways of thinking because we might, as is often the case, be wrong.
In this blog series, I share excerpts and stories from my book, When They Win, You Win. I hope you enjoyed this post and found some nuggets of value — if you want to connect you can reach me via email at vlad@vladcazacu.com or connect with me on www.vladcazacu.com and social. Also, my book is on Amazon — here is the link to buy it!
