“Urgency rarely leads to trust” – Seth Godin

It seems like entrepreneurship is sometimes like moving from one crisis to another. Either you’re running out of money or the big deal with the key customer is falling through or perhaps the product still has to many bugs to ship. And there’s always another week to put off starting the SBIR grant, until there’s not.

Urgency leads to desperation which is rarely attractive. If people sense you are desperate, it’s a sign your company will not be around much longer, which only aggravates the situation.

There’s this list of things you should “always” be doing:

Selling – sell something as soon as possible.
Raising capital – don’t until you run out of money to start raising the next round. Investors take their sweet time
Customer discovery – Talk to new customers every week
Innovation – “ideate” every day

There’s no easy answer. There are great tools and concepts that help manage time. Two I like are Jim Collins’ “Stop Doing List” and Steven Covey’s “First Things First” and of course the old fashioned To-Do list. Learn to recognize the things that are urgent but not important.

There is also your team. A great leader picks great teammates and delegates important tasks. It allows the opportunity to focus.

The chaos never goes away though. It is the nature of startups. So there’s one skill you’ll have to master and be comfortable with:

Fake it till you make it!!!

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson

“Fortune favors the prepared mind” – Louis Pasteur

Another version of this quote is “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

One trait of any successful person is the fact they are life-long learners. They constantly study their craft and they search for new things to learn. They look at how others solve problems, understanding their frameworks and trying to determine if there is an application they can apply. They read, they meet with others and they teach others. If you really want to learn something, teach it to someone else. Successful people constantly challenge themselves for what they think and they regularly reinvent their view of the world as they grow in learning and wisdom.

There are still places in the world where learning is reserved by those in power to control people and manage the populace. In the free world, learning is no longer limited in any way. World class universities are offering curricula online for free. Successful people freely share their stories in books and blogs and for entrepreneurs, local, regional and state sponsored entrepreneurship support programs offer great training.

It’s out there. It’s free. It’s your responsibility.

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson

“Innovation without implementation is wasted time.” – Pete Braile

Coming up with good ideas is the easy part. Get a group of smart people in a room and you can fill up a white board with the precipitation of a brainstorm.

The ideas are worthless and the time wasted if there is not a plan to implement. It means someone has to take responsibility and lead. It also means others must collaborate to accomplish the task.

This is the essence of being an entrepreneur. There are plenty of problems and plenty of ideas for solutions but these benefit no one unless the idea is put into the hands of a customer.

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson

“Even if your idea is worth stealing, the hard part is implementing the idea, not coming up with it.” – Guy Kawasaki

There are two lessons here. One is that VC’s consider patent protection a check box. But a patent doesn’t ensure commercial success by any stretch. What’s more is that it won’t keep anyone from stealing your idea if they really want to. This is why Samsung and Apple are suing each other and they have a lot more money than you do. Lawsuits are very expensive and out of reach unless you’re Apple or Samsung. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t protect your IP. Just understand that a patent is not a key to your product’s success in the market.

The second lesson is this. Sometimes people are introduced to us and want to talk about their business idea. Immediately after the business cards are exchanged, out come the NDA’s (non-discloure agreements). Well-meaning business attorneys encourage this. But this is a bad move. It shows a level of immaturity when it comes to pitching your idea. And the bottom line is, business advisors, incubators, mentors, investors, bankers and pretty much anyone else who’s out there to help you – will not sign them.

As a startup, you need more help than you can imagine. In order to acquire this help, you need to pitch your company… A Lot! The secret stuff you can keep secret; like how you make your ‘secret sauce’ or who your investors are. What business advisors are interested in is your business model and evidence your product works and that people will buy it. There should be nothing confidential about this. When it’s time to reveal your financial details or your design specs to a design partner, of course you want the protection of a good non-disclosure agreement.

Patents are a good thing and there is a time and a place for NDA’s but neither will protect you from competition. And you still have to figure out how to make your stuff, sell your stuff and get paid.

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson

“Whether you’re in school or not, it’s your job to get an education” – Austin Kleon

There’s great debate now on the value of a “formal” education when it comes to startups and entrepreneurship. There is a popular feeling that you’d be better off putting the money it takes to get an MBA into your first startup. Win or loose, you’d get a better “real world” education. That perspective has validity.

I live on both sides of the issue. I have gotten tremendous benefit from my formal business education because of the way it taught me to see the world and think about things. On the other hand, I didn’t leave the the perfect formula for success in business. But that’s ok because there isn’t one. If nothing else, I left business school at least knowing what I didn’t know. I knew the right questions to ask.

And that’s the core issue. Many first time entrepreneurs don’t know what they don’t know. They are “Unconscious Incompetents” and therefore suffer through the school of hard knocks. That’s in part why the failure rate of startups tops 90%.

Your job IS to get an education and today, there are more resources than ever before. Many of them are free. Steve Blank put his excellent Business Model Canvas course on udacity.com for free and it exceeds any MBA program you could find in entrepreneurship. There are countless blogs and wonderful accelerator programs all over the country. And there are evermore entrepreneurship programs in B schools across the country.

There is no terminal degree in startups. You can’t know everything and if you could, it completely changes every 3 – 5 years. This doesn’t mean you stop reading and learning. It’s ongoing.

Make time in your impossible schedule to take a class or seminar. Go through and accelerator program. Read, read, read!

Start with Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson

“Surprise comes from defying expectations.” – Seth Godin

Most of us have low expectations. Perhaps it’s because of the way we are treated by the cable company or the airlines. Perhaps it’s the lawyer commercials late at night. The constant barrage of advertising tends to desensitize. There is so much noise we can’t hear anything.

I’ve gotten used to standing in line to order a $12 salad and then having to buss my table even while they are sweeping the floor around my feet. That’s why it’s really something when the server actually makes a recommendation without the standard “Well, it depends on what you like.”

The good news is people are primed for positive experiences, and they don’t even know it. If you can solve a problem in a way people don’t expect, at the very least they will give you some of their attention. If your product or service happens to inject a pleasant surprise, something the customer did not expect, then you will likely have a customer who will pass their excitement on to others.

My first iPod came in a brightly colored box that was a 6″ cube; a very unusual package in a world of plastic blister pack that is impossible to open. I slipped off the sleeve and the box opened in half. On one side read “Designed by Apple in California”. The other half simply said “Enjoy”. Of course I opened that side first and there….. there it was, my first iPod. It was pure white and shiny.

I remember this some 12 years later because it was a beautiful surprise. What is it about a product where the memory of opening the box outlasts the product itself? And I have just passed that along to you.

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson

“Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies.” – Steve Blank

Those that seem to stay ahead of the curve are like wizards with magical powers. Successfully predicting what is next is extolled as genius and we all want some of that.

Much of the time though, great prognosticators are keen observers of their chosen environment. They collect data on what’s going on around them and these data may present them with a few distinct options. So they pick one. It either works or it doesn’t – based on how the data react. If it doesn’t they shift quickly to the next option. Rinse and repeat.

In startups, this IS the customer discovery process. It’s not magic. Learning how to do it once can launch a good company but long term success goes to those who figure out how to hardwire customer discovery into a continuous, almost unconscious process.

You should always measure the number of customer conversations you have over time and capture the information in some way. After a while it will seem like you just know things. Then resources will find you.

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson

“If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, come sit next to me.” – Sara D. Roosevelt

If your competition starts bashing you, that means you are threatening them and that’s good. As more people start talking about you in social networks, you’ll get the good the bad and the ugly and much of it may be lies.

I heard a news story today about a rich guy who shorted a particular company’s stock to the tune of a BILLION dollars. He then set out to tear them down and that included giving a substantial campaign contribution to his congressman to press for an FTC investigation into his target.

Don’t know what to say about all that except this –

Your customers chose you for a reason. Stay focused on them and stay focused on why you’re different from all the rest. The fact that others are threatened proves you have something of value and they have determined to try to beat you in the social networks rather than in the market.

Your good reputation in your market is a teflon coat that makes their mud slide right off.

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson

“To win in a market with a new product or service, you have to go after a market that has significant market pain, a pervasive problem, and a willingness to pay for a fix.” – Rob Adams

This one phrase sums up the customer discovery process. Many startups begin life as the founder’s passion for making a change. Creating a new gadget to solve a specific problem is the purview of the inventor. Inventors are wired to iterate and redesign until they are happy with their invention. This often uses up their resources and capital until there’s not much money left to start the company.

If you have entrepreneurial aspirations, then you need to determine if your cool new gadget idea is something people want and will pay money to acquire. Do this as early as possible so your design is informed by what the market wants and not what you think they want.

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson

“If you can begin to enjoy the process of building a startup rather than the outcome, you’ll be a better leader.” – Guy Kawasaki

I played football in high school and loved it. Small and moderately skilled, I didn’t start till my senior year but I stuck with it from 6th grade on. Football is a sport where if you’re into it just for playing in the games, there’s no value proposition. It’s not worth all the work, pain and commitment for a few minutes of excitement each week.

I realized much later that it was the process that engaged me; the practice, the preseason, the teamwork ethic. Being on the team had to be earned and it was the process that was rewarding, especially for those who would not go on to play in college.

Working with entrepreneurs is a similar experience. The process is arduous and filled with challenges. You have to love solving problems. You have to take the resources available and figure out how to be successful. And you will have to build your team. And while you have to have an eye on the big picture, it’s the work one week at a time that breeds success.

Enjoying the process gives you a subtle edge on leadership. You have an air of confidence that comes from moving in a direction. People are drawn to that.

Read Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki

Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson