Two Reasons New Entrepreneurs FAIL

All right, so I’m feeling a little bit feisty. I want to share with you the two things that I am noticing as a recurring trend, and new entrepreneurs who have an idea they want to go build a business. Specifically. I’m seeing this a lot within software, within apps and app development. For whatever reason. I keep hearing the same two things over and over recently, and it’s starting to annoy me. So I just wanted to do this podcast. The first is when I ask people who are first stepping into their, you know, the entrepreneurial journey, and they’re like, I want to build this thing.

I have this core skill. I can go build this thing to serve these people. And I get. I say, great, okay, what’s separating you from that goal right now? What are the roadblocks between you and where you’re trying to go? And quite often, what they will tell me is, they need money. They need investor capital to go and fund the thing. Or they tell me they need to go and build the team first before they need the money to build the team. Right. All that.

And I’m like, that doesn’t feel like the true constraint of the business here. If you need money to go build a thing that would make you money, then you are doing it wrong. What you really need is a product and a customer. That’s all. That’s what you need. And when I hear people say, like, oh, I need investors to invest in my thing, to take a risk on me, and then I need a team. I need to go get my CTO, my co founder, all this stuff. All I think is, this person’s probably not going to make it very far in this game because they’re focusing on the wrong things.

They don’t fundamentally understand that the goal of a business is to deliver a product or a service to a customer. And what you need is simply a product or a service and a customer. And so in the beginning, all your time, your focus should just go towards developing your product. And that doesn’t have to be as robust as you think it does. You don’t need millions of dollars of funding in 99.9% of cases to prove that there is a market out there for what you want to build, to be able to go and sell it. In many cases, you can pre sell the idea of the product to prove the viability of what it is that you want to build. But when I talk to people, new entrepreneurs, they never talk about that. They’re never like, you know what? I went out, I had this idea, so I went and I presold it to 100 people to prove that there’s the concept there.

I collected this money that I’m going to use to then go fund the development for the next month, and then we’re going to bring this to the market. MVP. And then we’re going to expand from there. They never say that stuff, or at least when they do, when they do say that, it’s a sure sign that they’re going to succeed because they understand the theory of constraints and they’re focusing on the right part of the machine. Now, the other part, I have this other guy this morning that I was talking to, very similar, except they already have the MVP. They already have some beta users in their program, in their product or service, and people are giving them feedback. I’m like, awesome. What’s stopping you or slowing you down from taking that and going, getting more users? Now you already have some users.

Why not go get more users, bring them in, keep getting more feedback. Use that feedback loop to improve the product and it’s a positive cycle. Well, he goes, well, me and my partners were in school and we graduate next year. My partner graduates the year after. And we said that we were going to focus on school this year and then we would focus again on this app next summer to take it to that next level. So they used this summer to hack together this thing, prove a little bit of a use case and get some users. And now they’re going to take the year off, pick it back up next summer, and then he’s going to pick it up the summer after that when his co founding partner finally graduates. So two years from now, you can expect this product or service that they’ve been working on to finally come to market.

And I’m like, dude, you’re this. I love, I love that you’re focused on the education school. Cool. I love that you built this thing and that you’ve proven that there’s a little bit of demand for it. But like, you’re twisted if you think that you’re going to be able to sit on this for the next two years and be able to pick it up and find success with it. Because the truth is, in business, momentum is everything. Doesn’t matter how great your idea is, if you move with enough momentum, you can take a bad idea and get, you go pretty far with it. But if you have a great idea but you don’t move towards it with enough momentum, with enough initiative and intention, it will die.

It will die on the vine every single time. And I will tell you, in the fast pacing world of software, of apps, of programs. Two years is too long. By the time they get around, to get around to this project, it’s going to be dead. And I just told them that. I was like, hey, you know what? Maybe that’s not the priority for you. Maybe this isn’t actually that important of a thing and it’s just a side hustle, which case, totally cool. But just understand if this is actually truly important to you and you think that you can make, you want to make this business work, you need to run at it hard right now.

You need to be running as hard as you possibly can every single day right now. Because if you wait, it won’t work. I promise you that it will die. And so I wanted to share those two things with you. Not because I think you’re going to fall into those traps, and that you think you need money and resources to go build the thing and prove the viable viability of your concept, or because I think you’re not moving with enough initiative or momentum. I just know that the majority of entrepreneurs out there, not you out there in the world, they’re not listening to this podcast, they’re not like us, they’re not awesome. They are making the fundamental mistake. But you, you’re not.

And so to make sure that we definitely 100% don’t make this mistake, we need to analyze what we’re doing right. It’s not enough just to say, oh, they’re doing it wrong and I’m doing it right. We need to take what they’re doing wrong and ask ourselves, okay, where are some of the glimpses of what they’re doing? Seeping into what I’m doing? A little bit of critical thinking, a little self reflection. So take a moment and ask yourself, where is it that I believe I am lacking resources rather than resourcefulness? That’s the first 1 second. Ask yourself, where am I not moving with enough intention, with enough intensity. Ask yourself those two questions, answer them, and then you have clarity as to what it is you need to tackle, what you need to run towards, like that dickens over the next three months. Now go get it.