Alright, so it’s not a river
There’s an old joke that I’ve heard a few times and I absolutely love. The wording from Oliver Burkeman in Meditations for Mortals is perfect, so I’ll just quote it:
A celebrated rabbi is on his deathbed. His students are lined up in order of seniority to pay their respects, awaiting his final words with bated breath. Eventually, and with effort, the rabbi opens his eyes, then addresses his most senior student. ‘Life,’ he declares, ‘is a river.’
The student turns to the next most senior, and the message gets carried down the line: ‘The rabbi says life is a river.’ ‘The rabbi says life is a river.’ Only the most junior student, the last to receive the words, is naive enough to venture a question. ‘But what does the rabbi mean, “life is a river”?’ The query comes back up the line, until the senior student, trembling at the audacity of questioning the master, manages to blurt it out. ‘My rabbi, I’m sorry, but what do you mean, “life is a river”?’ The old man is moments from expiring. But for one last time, he opens his eyes, and regards the student in unblinking silence. Then he shrugs, and turns up his palms. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘So it’s not a river.’
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Startups are stressful because you’re constantly discovering that you’re wrong.
If you’re a carpenter building a chair, you might not know exactly how each step of the building process will go, but you have a pretty good idea of where you’re looking to end up.
But with your startup, you’ll start out with a hypothesis that you’re sure is right and it’ll be totally wrong. This is both fine and guaranteed - markets are efficient, the first idea you have for a startup isn’t going to just be available. There aren’t $100 bills lying on the sidewalk.
So, you’ll speak with customers and run experiments and change your hypothesis until it’s less and less wrong. Ideally, you’ll end up with something people actually find useful, you’ll charge a price that allows you to build more of that thing which will help you learn all the other ways you’re wrong, you'll fix those, and on and on.
If this approach sounds shaky, that’s because it is. But it’s the only one that works. Which means you’ll need to get used to two things:
Recognizing that whatever hypothesis you have right now is both the best hypothesis you’ve got at the moment and totally wrong.
Changing things that you thought were right once you realize they were wrong
Startups are a game of recognizing how you’re wrong and adjusting. The recognizing comes from close customer interaction, the changing comes from your ability to not suffer from sunk cost fallacy.
Whenever someone with an idea shows up to Tacklebox with a business plan I give them some tough love - every piece of it is wrong. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth thinking through, but it cannot be something you reference as a “plan.”
Your plan is a reaction to how customers act when you try to solve their problem.
Since you’ll usually be wrong, you’ve got to get good at this sentence:
“Ok, so it’s not a river.”
Then figure out what it is.