One mistake entrepreneurs make is expecting too much too soon. While everything is clear in their minds, that’s rarely the case for customers.
Expecting Too Much Too Soon
One mistake entrepreneurs make is expecting too much too soon.
In your mind, the product works. The business model is clear. Prospects immediately understand the demo, see the value, and money starts coming in.
But a useful rule of thumb is: “Nothing new ever works.”
Even getting prospects to pay attention requires iteration. Before someone agrees to watch a demo or evaluate your product, they first consume your message, positioning, or product description. If that does not resonate, the demo never happens.
And if getting attention is hard, getting people to pay money is ten to a hundred times harder.
Early-stage success requires target practice: experimentation, tinkering, careful listening, and steady improvement. You have to pay attention not only to what prospects say, but also to what they avoid saying.
A good way to protect yourself is to develop Plan B and Plan C before you start Plan A. If you talk to 20 people who fit your target customer profile and none react positively or offer constructive feedback, it is time to shift.
One of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship is that many things you feel confident will work generate no response at all. You have to learn to persevere in the face of a 90% failure rate.
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- We like to use the analogy of a combination lock to describe the early startup learning process: there are four key aspects of your product that need to be in sync: Need, Impact, Customer Segment, and Message. Fundamentally, this startup combination lock requires four correct settings to open. To keep it open as your product and customer needs evolves they need to stay in sync.
- Ryan Waggoner: Maybe Startups Are So Hard Because We’re Doing Them Wrong
- Investors naturally gravitate towards founders who either hit a billion dollars in a few years, or die trying (sometimes literally), and then investors and founders both are incentivized to craft this story that they only way to win is to win big, fast, and with all your chips on the line.
- New Market Exploration
- New market exploration is one of the most difficult customer development challenges that entrepreneurs face. It requires strong interview and sense making skills. It also requires a commitment to carefully observe and document customer behavior–with a willingness not only to “go and see” but to have the imagination to ask “what if” to explore what could happen if you would remove one or more constraints imposed by the status quo. Entrepreneurs must see underneath the surface behavior of prospects and their self-reported problem descriptions to understand the cognitive model for a task or job to be done by your product. Developing a first prototype–or even what you think may be your first product–does not mean that the need for further interviews and imagination goes away, if anything it’s just the next basecamp for further exploration. New market exploration requires not only the confidence to form a vision of a solution but the willingness to be surprised and to admit where your mental map does not match the actual territory, integrating new “ground truth” to improve your product and business model.”
- Marshall McLuhan: How To See The Future
- “To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to see clearly where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.”
Warren Ellis “How To See The Future” (Sep-7-2012) - “I have gradually come to appreciate that the really important predictions are about the present. What is happening right now, and what is its significance?” Robert Lucky
- “To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to see clearly where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.”
- Ten Mistakes Early Stage Bootstrappers Often Make
- #7 Expecting Too Much Too Soon: Not Planning for “Target Practice”, Iteration, and Improvement
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To Make Sense of What You Have Seen and Heard.
An early market can be like a combination lock, you may have discovered one or two of the keys to opening it, but it’s hard to assess partial progress. Exploring a market it’s like listening to 15-20 second snippets from songs you have never heard before, you have to make sense of what a number of folks are telling you: little sounds familiar and it’s hard work. If you are having trouble making sense of what you have learned from your initial early market conversations, please sign up for an no cost no obligation office hours session and we can help you make sense of what you have seen and heard. If you are preparing to scout a new market and would like a briefing for a descent into chaos, you are also welcome to sign up for an office hours session.
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