How To Make It as a
First-Time Entrepreneur

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

It’s hard to argue against going through the Customer Development Process (CDP) when building your startup. It just makes sense and experienced entrepreneurs are really excited about it. If you want to learn more, I recommend starting with Steve Blank’s Four Steps to Epiphany and Eric Reis’s Lessons Learned blog.

But, despite reading the books, the blogs, going to the meetups and truly believing in CDP, most of us don’t do it and our startups fail. We come up with some practical excuses:

• We don’t have the time for it.
• I already know what our customers want.
• We can’t convince customers to meet with us without a real prototype.
• We’re not ready yet.

These are BS reasons. The real reason is we’re afraid. We don’t want to grab someone from craigslist and have them tell us our idea is dumb. We don’t want a potential customer at a big company to laugh at our idea. We quit our job for the idea. We have risked our savings. Our professional credibility is on the line. We’ve convinced people to be part of our team.  Their livelihoods and their families are counting on us. What if people tell us they don’t like our idea? I’m not sure we can handle that kind of feedback/rejection.

So, what do we do?  We close our eyes, build the product and launch it. Hopefully, when we finally open our eyes, we find people using it. Most of the time, people aren’t using it and we’re in big trouble. It’s reckless and not fair to our team, our investors and our family.

How do we overcome that fear? We have to convince ourselves of two critical points (the most experienced entrepreneurs have successfully done this):

• Our initial idea isn’t worth much. If our initial idea isn’t worth much, where’s the value?  The value is in the team. More specifically, the value lies in our ability to continually adjust that initial idea based on feedback from potential customers and morph it into something that people need. If we’re not doing that, we’re not creating value and our startups are relying on luck to succeed.

• Changing our idea isn’t inconsistent, it’s smart. Our society rewards people for being consistent.  When people aren’t consistent, our society punishes them (e.g., politicians get negatively labeled as “flip flops” for being inconsistent). In the startup world, we don’t have to be consistent.  We should be willing to dramatically change our views based on what we learn. We have to overcome that instinctual urge to remain consistent.

So, lets stop coming up with excuses for why we aren’t meeting with customers.  Face our fears and get out there and start learning what’s wrong with our ideas and figuring out how to fix it.

(photo via Scott Ableman)

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.