Outline Entrepreneurs vs. Discovery Entrepreneurs
I’m writing a startup book (help me write it here) and a novel simultaneously-ish. It’s probably 90% startup book 10% novel for now, but I’ve been studying up on how to write a novel because I’ve never done it before.
One of the bigger revelations has been that there are two distinct ways to write a novel, so novelists fall into one of two buckets: Outline Writers or Discovery Writers.
An Outline Writer is exactly what it sounds like. Before you write the book you figure out what’s going to happen. Maybe you don’t have every scene planned, but you’ve got the big stuff - a big city detective retires and moves to a small farming town in West Texas to relax, but there’s a murder and he’s the only one who can solve it. He falls in love with a local who makes him more interested in the case, he has a few big breaks which lead him in a direction that gets him in trouble with that person he loves, and, in the end, it turns out SHE was the murderer.
You get that all out on a big piece of paper, then start writing it.
Discovery Writers are different. Stephen King is a Discovery Writer. He’ll say something like: “wouldn’t it be wild if you were sitting on a park bench in Chicago and an older guy sat next to you and said he knows who killed your mom?”
Then, he writes. Maybe the character on the bench says “my mom isn’t dead,” or maybe they stand up and walk away quickly and tell themselves the old man isn’t well but they subconsciously know he is. Whatever the character does, the writer reacts to it and moves forward. They “discover” the story as they go.
Both types of writers can be successful.
The obvious transition here is to help you figure out which type of entrepreneur you are, but that isn’t necessary because I already know. You’re an Outline Entrepreneur. Like 99% of founders I’ve met are Outline Entrepreneurs. That’s because it seems far less risky. If you’ve got an MBA or worked in finance or consulting you probably already made your outline and call it a business plan and are pretty fired up about it.
Maybe you’ll run customer interviews but you’ll just “learn” that the hypothesis you showed up with is (at least) mostly correct. Then, you’ll hire a dev shop or “vibe code” (don’t call it that) an MVP which you can already picture, and that’ll get you some paying customers and then you’ll raise money and so forth.
There are two huge problems with being an Outline Entrepreneur.
The first is that it just don’t work. If you go into an interview but already know what you’re going to hear, that means it didn’t come from a real discovery process which means it won’t actually be insightful. It’ll be the same surface idea thousands of other entrepreneurs have had. Outline Entrepreneurs never build anything differentiated.
The second is that you’ll skip steps. Since you already know what you’re going to build, why do you have to do customer interviews? Why do you have to do ethnographic research? You can just build the thing. And, why do you have to get customer feedback on it if you can just skip to raising funding? It feels like you’re moving quickly through a plan, but that plan was made on your kitchen table and isn’t worth the Trader Joes mango salsa you spilled on it. It’s make believe.
It’s obviously hard to go into a set of interviews without any bias, but your job as an entrepreneur is to do just that. To treat interviews like Stephen King treats the character on the bench. When you ask about the problems they’re stuck on this past month and they tell you something you didn’t expect, hear it. React to it. You don’t have to necessarily pivot and solve it, but collect it as a real data point.
Startups are a counterintuitive blend of proactive and reactive. You’re proactive when you speak to people and try things to get in front of more people. You’re reactive when you take what you learn from customers and use it to build something.
It seems way more comfortable to be an Outline Entrepreneur, which is how you know it won’t work.