There’s quite a few “traditional knowledge” about entrepreneurship that’s just undeniable incorrect. Here are the worst offenders.
We nonetheless have an extended manner to go to get to in which I’d name Groove a fulfillment.
But we’ve been operating tough at this for a long term now, and one of the maximum valuable things that I’ve gotten from the enjoy to this point is perspective.
I’ve discovered a lot – we all have – and I examine commercial enterprise and entrepreneurship in a totally extraordinary manner now than I did five years in the past.
There were such a lot of assumptions that I had which have been demonstrated incorrect that I’ve lost be counted, or even completely forgotten approximately most of them.
But these days, I’m very lucky to get many questions from founders looking for advice. And I’m reminded of just what number of myths are floating round about growing a commercial enterprise. Myths that I believed, and that many (if no longer maximum) first-time founders nonetheless trust.
I’ve commenced a listing under, and I desire you’ll help me upload to it within the comments. Let’s shatter those myths collectively.
Check out the overall list on this SlideShare, or examine on for a better clarification of every one.
The 20 Biggest Myths About Building a Business from Groove
1) Founders Are Their Own Bosses
There’s a belief amongst many that the founder is the ultimate boss in any business enterprise.
That couldn’t be in addition from the reality. The founder constantly answers to a person, whether it’s the board, the traders, or most significantly, the clients.
After all, founders don’t keep the lighting fixtures on. Customers do.
Yes, you may technically choose now not to do the whole thing on your electricity to be first-rate at your job, but similar to some other employee, your boss – the customer – is ultimately going to fireplace you.
2) The Founder Should Do Every Job inside the Early Days
A lot of founders tell me that they don’t have enough time to invest hours into customer improvement or content advertising.
Yet they spend hours each week on such things as scheduling, net studies and formatting investor decks. Even when you don’t have quite a few cash, spotting wherein you can be getting massively more returns on your time – as an instance, spending an hour doing customer improvement versus spending an hour formatting a pitch deck – and then delegating or outsourcing the less important duties is one in every of the most important private wins you could rating.
3) Starting a Business Is the Best Way to Get Rich
More than as soon as, I’ve heard founders tell me that their important motivation for starting a business is that it’s the handiest way to obtain “monetary independence.”
Guess what. There are plenty extra dependable and less volatile methods to obtain financial independence than becoming an entrepreneur.
For instance, through investing in your self, gaining knowledge of a valuable talent (like coding), building a strong community, leveraging that network to land nicely-paid jobs and saving intelligently, you’ll be on a much more certain route to economic freedom than maximum entrepreneurs.
You can get rich in business, but it’s virtually now not the very best, or most guaranteed manner.
4) Launching at an Industry Conference Will Set You Up for Success
I get worried while a founder tells me how excited they're to be launching at Conference X in some weeks. They’ll use the thrill from that, they typically keep, to construct their initial user base, and then it’ll handiest get higher from there.
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The reality is this approach nearly by no means works. Conference launches are a arrogance event; they make you experience nice, but hardly ever cause real, long-time period business results.
It’s extraordinary what number of founders I’ve talked to who were given a grand overall of 0 paying customers following their event launches.
And often, those who do get signups from the event come to be with tire-kickers who don’t fit into their ideal customer profile anyway, and come to be churning at first-rate, and giving terrible feedback and inflicting you to make erroneous product changes at worst.
Five) You Should Keep Your Product Secret Until It’s Ready
If your pitch starts offevolved with “however earlier than I inform you, I just want you to sign this NDA,” you’re doing it wrong.
Ideas are the maximum highly overvalued forex in the commercial enterprise global. We all have thoughts, and my ideas, combined, haven’t made me a dime. The ninety nine% of the equation that counts most is the tireless hustle and considerate execution that you want to make any idea succeed.
I’d rather have a high-quality execution and second-fee strategy any time than a excellent concept and mediocre control.
Jamie Dimon, President and CEO of JPMorgan Chase
6) You Need to Take a Lot of Huge Risks
Entrepreneurship is often associated with risk, and I don’t without a doubt suppose that’s a beneficial association, because it encourages first-time entrepreneurs to be more gung-ho with their choice making.
In truth, the entrepreneurs I know who win constantly are pretty chance-averse.
They’ll make calculated bets and take smaller dangers – this is what lean startups are constructed round – as opposed to swinging for the fences with any unmarried commercial enterprise choice.
Taking smaller dangers and hedging against loss allows you stay around for plenty longer… and offers you the time to area plenty greater calculated bets.
7) Everyone Shares Your Problems
We’re all at risk of the fake-consensus effect, wherein we expect that others proportion the equal beliefs that we do.
But simply due to the fact we have a specific trouble or viewpoint, doesn’t imply that our clients do.
In truth, understanding that very reality turned into certainly one of my most eye-beginning business classes. When we first released, we constructed that Groove that we wanted, no longer the only our customers desired.
It took six lengthy, costly months to get back on course with our product improvement.
Eight) You Should Raise Money Whenever You Can
Just because money is on the table doesn’t mean you need to take it.
If an investor gives to fund you, you must genuinely keep in mind it, but be careful. An provide like that could bend the way you examine your enterprise dreams and path to success, and the earlier you take in cash, the sooner you’ll be anticipated to produce a return on that cash.
And now and again, that strain is what kills groups of their infancy, earlier than they’ve had a hazard to apprehend their marketplace and actually give you a product that fits.
Plus, every time you are taking funding, don’t forget about any other big enterprise fantasy:
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nine) Founder Dilution Isn’t a Problem
There’s an regularly-repeated sentiment among founders (specially first-time founders) that they’d “rather very own a small piece of a massive pie than a massive piece of a small pie.”
I agree. But the probabilities of your pie developing huge enough to make a small piece valuable are much decrease than the possibilities of your entire pie developing big enough to make maximum (or all) of it valuable.
Be practical about where your enterprise might turn out to be. Every time you dilute your possession, you divest your self from the achievement of the business, and in a global wherein you want to be absolutely devoted to operating your ass off for years earlier than seeing results, that’s a risky and demoralizing place to be.
10) Spamming People on Social Media Is a Good Marketing Strategy
I’ve visible startups where someone – normally an intern – is given the overall-time activity of finding influencers on Twitter and Tweeting at them with a pitch to try the organisation’s product.
I’ve *never *visible this paintings. Not with that technique, besides.
You get influencers’ attention by using growing price for them, no longer by joining the masses of different startups seeking out a handout.
11) You Need to Rent an Office
Another real quote:
Our first order of business is renting an office to work out of.
There are only a few things that a bootstrapped business wishes in its earliest days, and an office isn’t certainly one of them.
Work from home, espresso stores, coworking spaces… anywhere that doesn’t tie up hundreds of bucks per month that might be better spent truely building your commercial enterprise.
And then, in case you don’t need to move the remote route, put money into an office whilst you can readily take care of the cost.
12) Your First Hires Should All Be Developers
If your group of four-5 human beings is a hundred% developers (which include the founder), you’re lacking out.
Unless certainly one of your builders is doing complete-time purchaser improvement, and another one is doing complete-time advertising (yes, even earlier than your product has released), and some other one is doing customer service, then you definitely’re missing a few critical commercial enterprise functions which might be a long way more critical on your business than the incremental value of a 3rd or fourth developer at that level of your enterprise.
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13) It’s All About the Product
Another belief I’ve seen is that in case you construct a product that’s true enough, you’ll win.
But products don’t win. Businesses do.
And if you need to beat the opposition, your product isn’t all that topics. You’ll also ought to out-marketplace them, out-help them and outperform them in many different methods.
Great advertising won’t keep a shitty product, however with shitty advertising, even a first rate product doesn’t stand a risk.
14) If You Can Just Land That Huge Customer, You’ll Win
We spent lots of time in our first few months chasing a huge potential account.
They wanted us to spend many hours building a custom answer for them, offer a complete-time dedicated guide aid and make different preparations to make the product suit their wishes.
And ultimately, after attaining an settlement to get began, they walked away, leaving us with not anything however a huge setback in our development timeline.
I’ve heard comparable testimonies from many founders, and in the long run, those offers, even if they go through, aren't plenty extra than a large distraction, and banking your future success on them is a very dangerous flow.
15) “Lines of Code” Is a Success Metric
This might also sound apparent and lame to a lot of you, because it's miles.
But I’ve tragically heard it enough instances that it desires to be covered right here. If any part of your pitch mentions what number of strains of code you’ve written on the way to make the huge number look like an accomplishment, you’re lacking the point.
16) Your New Rockstar Developer Will Turn Your Company Around
Just weeks in the past, I heard from a founder who became pinning his hopes on the brand new ex-Apple developer that he simply paid a boatload of coins to enroll in his startup.
But just like the entirety else in a enterprise, a unmarried developer won’t make or wreck it. And even the first-rate developer, without an exquisite supporting solid and the marketing, support and approach to get humans efficiently using your product will do you little accurate.
17) “We Can Worry About Money Later”
If you often study TechCrunch, you’ve in reality visible this sentiment.
We’re just centered on getting users now, we’ll discern out a way to monetize later.
And that’s superb. IF you’ve raised thousands and thousands in mission funding and have years of runway.
But the equal lesson doesn’t practice to bootstrapped startups. You can’t find the money for to aggressively court users with out a concept how you’ll come to be earning money.
If you’re going to build a commercial enterprise, one of the first stuff you want to do is parent out the way it’s certainly going to be a enterprise.
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18) Everything Needs to Be Scaleable
Another concept that the startup global fetishizes is scalability.
If it received’t scale, we don’t do it.
After all, we’re making plans to grow like crazy, so what’s the point of losing time now on techniques that gained’t paintings later?
But this misses an vital point: the techniques that you want now are very distinctive from the techniques you’ll need later.
If you haven’t reached product/market healthy and don’t have sufficient paying users to see a clean roadmap to profitability, you then’re not geared up to think about scale.
We nevertheless do a lot of factors that don’t scale, and I don’t plan to stop for an extended, long time.
19) More Features Will Improve Your Product
As we construct our merchandise, it’s clean to get caught within the loop of wondering that the greater tremendous capabilities we construct, the extra beneficial and attractive our product might be.
Unfortunately, the other is proper loads extra frequently.
Features aren’t advantages. Many functions deliver advantages, but no function itself is a gain. Ease of use, however, is a gain. Every characteristic you add makes your product a bit much less easy to use, so earlier than adding any feature, assume very cautiously approximately whether you’re including a benefit, or reducing one.
20) You Can’t Afford Top Talent
Think you could’t lease top expertise because you don’t have as tons coins as Google and Facebook?
Think once more.
There are so many elite developers, entrepreneurs and aid sellers obtainable, and not they all are prompted solely through cash.
Many need a exceptional way of life than the only Facebook can offer. Many would as an alternative work for a small, agile organization, or one which allows them to make money working from home, or one which offers them a hazard to personal large components of the decision-making technique.
There are many advantages that you may offer that your wealthy competition can’t, and people do count number.
What Are Other Big Business Myths?
This listing is lengthy, however it’s never exhaustive.
I’d love to feature to it. What myths have you ever arise against? Let me recognize within the feedback.
