What Most New Entrepreneurs Get Wrong

For most entrepreneurs, the beginning of their business starts with the "Ah ha!" moment when inspiration strikes like a light bulb suddenly flashing to life in the midst of the dark of night. They become so consumed by their new passion they believe that it's merits will be self evident and the product or service will fly off the shelves. For some that avoid that train of thought, they face the chicken and egg conundrum. They realize that getting paying customers in is top priority so they can make money but without money how can they build the product or service let alone the team and business behind it all. 

This is where most entrepreneurs struggle, give up, or fail. Lets get one thing clear, Sales is king, sales must be the top of your thoughts day in and day out, especially when your an entrepreneur. Grant Cardone in  "Sell Or Be Sold" said it best. "In life your either selling or your being sold" Think about that for a second, every decision we make is the result of us being sold on a concept, reward, idea, pleasure or pain. Once you understand that your life as an entrepreneur will become much easier. 

These are the 3 things entrepreneurs should be doing when that fated light bulb clicks on.

1. Idea Validation

We are about to get into some really exciting concepts here so hold on to your underwear. This is something I was introduced to while going through my first cohort with Portio. When I began that cohort my concept for Portio was completely different than what it ended up being. Through the process of talking with customers I found out not only that the need for what I wanted to build was much smaller than I believed, but also that I had a competitor that had an amazing product that was already available. 

So how should you go about validating a new concept or business. Pretty much every business is solving a need or desire to some group of people. When figuring out if you have a valid idea, this is what we are going to focus on. First define your audience or customer, For Portio it was investors getting started in real estate investing (Its ok at this stage to keep it kind of broad) The next step is to find a bunch of those people that YOU DO NOT KNOW, that is an important part to this. Do not talk to your friends and family about this. Next get them to agree to give you 15 minutes of their time and ask them some vague open ended questions about the problems they face or the desires they want met.

For Portio, I asked a lot of questions along the lines of "What problems do you face when it comes to real estate investing? What about that is so difficult or frustrating, What are you currently doing to alleviate that pain point" that type of stuff. Notice I never asked " Do you have a problem with X? or is "THIS" a problem for you?". This type of questing is a leading question and something you want to stay away from in these early questionings. 

What you should be doing in these is listening to your target customers needs and wants and then begin thinking about how to craft a solution to the things they need. 

2. Gauge Potential For Profitability

The next step after talking to about 50 people about their problems is to ask more people if they would pay "X" to solve that problem. You can do this in the same conversation after you have talked with them about their problems or you could do this after those conversations and had a little while to think about how you would actually solve those problems. This is essentially pre selling the product, you can take this step one step further and ask for their email and contact info, if they indicated they would pay for a solution. This goes leaps and bounds for convincing people that you may need to get on your team, whether money partners, technical partners or whoever. 

3. Design The Idea

This is where most entrepreneurs start, They build a product or service without ever validating if someone wants it or not. After doing steps 1 and 2, design what your service or product will do and look like for as cheap as possible, so if that mean hand drawing some wireframes of the revolutionary app that you want to build then great, If it means whittling the product out of wood then do that. Whatever the fastest, cheapest way to get something to show people and talk about it is, then do that. 

This allows you to test step number 2 again with something people could look at, feel, interact with (even if its just in their mind) they will be bale to give you feed back and you can continue to pre-sale it. From there its just about building onto the product or service as you get feed back and once you feel there is enough validated data to begin production on the real thing then go ahead.

Conclusion 

No one will be able to tell you when you should begin working on your business, but if you have validated the problem and accumulated a list of people willing to buy it from you once its made. Then going out and building it or starting the business should be much easier.

This is a super simple, generalized version of how this process should work. So if you want someone to walk you through some of these concepts or brainstorm a strategy around this then feel free to do some free consulting with me. I will give anyone a little bit of my time for free to help them get them started. Good luck with your business everyone, go forth and conquer, mighty hero.