It’ll Happen on the Way

Lot’s of founders in the program think stuff happens this way:

And if you were going to give the founder an “idea confidence level” at each step, it’d look like this:

This is a huge problem, because it causes you to spend a ton of time here:

And while I love speaking with customers, there’s a limit to what you’ll learn before you put yourself on the hook and actively try to solve their problem. Waiting for clarifying a-ha moments around customer or problem or idea before you move forward is a startup-killer.

Here’s what this should actually feel like. The first two steps - the bliss of the idea and the smack in the face from reality - are accurate. But, once you start to refine the idea after speaking with customers, this is more realistic:

The first Concierge MVP should, as one member succinctly put it, “feel a bit random.” And unfortunately, you can’t skip random. Random is a huge part of the process and a giant advantage for you. Most founders won’t move forward through random — they’ll quit because it’s uncomfortable.

But everything valuable you’ll ever learn is on the other side of tests you’ll run that you won’t be remotely confident in. You won’t have a clear view of the entire picture before you run tests — you’ll earn that view by running a whole bunch of them. The insights come after.

One of my favorite quotes is by E.L. Doctorow and it’s about writing, but it works just as well for starting a business:

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”