Today, November 17th, is National Entrepreneur’s Day, and in celebration of all of the millions of entrepreneurs around the world chasing after their dreams to get to market and win, I want to highlight a few of the key lessons learned over the past ten years that will help you not only survive, but thrive …
Between 2016 and 2018 I attended Stanford University for a series of continuing educational courses on entrepreneurship and design thinking. My goal was to sharpen the tools in my tool belt, meet some incredibly gifted and motivated classmates, and hopefully walk away with a clearer understanding of how to tackle today’s most pressing entrepreneurial challenges …
Sterilize. Sanitize. Disinfect. Decontaminate. Wipe Down. Rinse Off. Repeat. Welcome to the Contam Culture – a new “normal” modus operandi if you will, we’ve been forced to accept in a pandemic induced world. As the weeks become months under the quarantined, sheltered, physically-distanced era, businesses and consumers have had to adapt to this radical shift …
Startups are not only a biggest test of our abilities to execute on a market hunch, but more deeply, the limitations of our own mind. They fully test everything we think we know about ourselves — from our deepest fears to our highest hopes — and most startups fail in the mind first, and the market second. …
Ad: One of my favorite past times is reading books on business, marketing and behavioral economics. I’ve recently come across a book over the holiday break that hit the nail on the head in today’s over saturated product world. Alchemy, by Rory Sutherland, https://amzn.to/2tnIU7Q, is not just a fun read (it literally had me …
Startups — The Ultimate Video Game It’s the end of the year — end of a decade to be exact — and that’s the time when many Founders find themselves asking the hardest question that they’ll ever face — should I just give up on my startup? After running four startups, managing teams, and seeing …
What’s the power of a thought? Everywhere we turn we hear the advice, recommendations, opinions and suggestions of others — imploring us to focus harder, try with more gusto, defy the odds stacked against us, build the resolve to never give up — good advice we can usually all agree is needed to accomplish any …
WHAT? YOU DON’T LOVE MY IDEA? To Survive a Startup, First, Kill Your Ego If you’re the type of person, like I was in my 20s, who was seeking encouragement from others to continually reinforce your ideas, beliefs and path, get ready to get shook up when you start a company. Encouragement comes and goes, …
What truly sets an Entrepreneur apart? Her ability to imagine what could be, and more importantly, her unwavering drive to bring forth a new reality to ameliorate the world. This quote by George Bernard Shaw inspired me to become an #entrepreneur when I was 19 years old. Sometimes all it takes in life is one phrase, one …
Can’t find your passion? Don’t worry. My Father used to tell me, “Do what you love in life, and the money will follow.” There’s some truth in that. For me however, I discovered a passion for the entrepreneurial journey, not just the product I was selling, the industry I was serving, or the …
💡If you’re considering starting a company this year, here’s a few lessons that should help you determine what’s the right business to start.
1) Don’t start a company in a space that requires other people to build every element of it for you.
Unless you’re well funded, typically in the early days, you will need to dig in and do the actual building. This is not to say you need to code if you’re not a coder - but it does mean that you need a good understanding of design elements for websites or apps in order to effectively guide your team to build your vision correctly.
2) Don’t raise capital until you have a working product.
This is a really hard concept for founders to get, because starting a business always requires capital, and we hear stories of founders raising huge venture capital, but the key is to see how far along you can possibly get without outside investors. Why? Because they can a) distract you from actually building the product b) guide you to build at a faster pace and do things that aren’t necessarily in your best interest or make you grow before you fully understand your customer.
3) For 30 days, while you are conceptualizing building your business - simply remove the requirement of a business model (to make money).
This is completely counterintuitive to running a business, but in the early days, you must focus entirely on listening to potential customers, satisfying them more than they can imagine (or have been by other products they currently use), and determine the viability of your market demand.
Adding a layer of monetization (making money) complicates the design process and forces you to try and “take” from your customers, where you should focus entirely on “giving”.
Do these 3 simple things, and your startup idea will be off to an incredible start.
After 30 days, focus in on what’s working, what’s not, and why. Double down your efforts on the market that deeply yearns for your solution, and ignore all others (at least initially). Focus focus focus is the name of the game for your first 30-90 days.
Comment below to let me know how you started your first business and how you got it from idea to market! 👇👇👇
#entrepreneur #nostartupleftbehind #startups #founder #business #entrepreneurship
A founder struggling to get market adoption in LATAM asked me this question today. Here’s my 2¢:
Q: We are struggling to get some sectors to see data as a source of value - the LATAM market is still very skeptical in knowing how to find value in their data, we need to educate them about it. How might we solve this?
A: As for gaining traction with LATAM, you might consider researching how earlier technologies formed a “beach-head” in LATAM. Example, earlier software that is now ubiquitous might show you some unique channels that served tech before in LATAM to build trust and win buyers.
As for data, no one cares about data - they care about how you can solve their problem.
If you use data as your mechanism to do that, then you need to better illustrate the pain-points that they face today, and show them that via your software’s analysis of data that they already have (but are failing to understand and synthesize), you can draw key insights that help them increase sales, decrease costs, improve customer experiences, or build a competitive moat.
Tech is useless without application, use cases, and the utility that it delivers by solving pain.
Buyers never buy tech, they buy end-results. Focus on their end results, not yours, and you’ll improve your sales quickly.
#startups #founder #entrepreneurship #nostartupleftbehind #business
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