40 Semi-Obvious Startup Lessons.

May 31

Nothing inspires me more than being part of an entrepreneur's journey. It’s been a part of my journey too. The questions they seek to answer, the empathy required to understand the customer’s need, the ecstasy of success and agony of failure (sometimes within the same hour).

I find myself writing down the thoughts and advice I’ve given and been given. Some of them are stream of consciousness thoughts. Some of them I’ve ruminated over many times. And I decided to share some of the less obvious ones.

I hope they help you on your journey.

1. THE CUSTOMER IS NOT ALWAYS RIGHT

The sayings ‘the customer is always right’ or ‘the customer is king’ used to apply in a world where the customer had self-selected and walked into your store or shop to buy the products you’d advertised you were selling on said door. The customer knew what you were selling and chose to engage with you. You were obliged to listen to them and make a decision on whether they were right in telling you your product did not serve their needs or it did. They spoke with their money as they walked out of your shop with or without your product. The message was clear. Even if they were browsing, you could gauge their willingness or ability to buy your product.

In a mobile and online world this is not the case. Not every person or bot that clicks on your website or mobile app is there to purchase or engage with you in an interaction that will yield enough information to help you decide on what modifications you should make to every product you sell or service you provide.

The customer is only right or king when you are absolutely sure you have nailed the customer segment and you are talking to your customer.

2. THE BUDGET IS NOT ABOUT THE NUMBERS

Budgets are a necessary part of any business. You plan financially using the budget mechanism. Unlike in a mature business entity when things like revenue and expenses are a lot more structured, planned and predictable, the budget, in the early days, is less about the actual numbers you have in the spreadsheet. It has so little to do with the numbers you might as well not create budgets.

But it’s a good idea that you do.

Budgeting in the early days of your business, when the numbers don’t mean much, is all about building the muscles of financial rigor that will be required when your business grows and gets a bit more complicated as revenue comes from different sources and a lot more is involved in managing things like cashflow. It’s really about the disciplined approach you take to thinking about every single aspect of your business in the early days, as expressed through the financial planning that goes into a budget.

3. THE ONLY THING YOU CONTROL IS YOUR ATTITUDE

We only really control one thing in our lives. One thing. It’s how we approach things, as manifested by our attitude. The choice we make about how we perceive, react and respond to the circumstances we face as we go about this journey called building a business. Attitude isn’t the only thing that isn’t left to the randomness that is life. Whether we accept it or not, we control very little beyond our attitudes. A personal anecdote that explains this realization is when I was hit by a cyclist as I crossed the road one day. It had nothing to do with how much I had planned the day or how much work I had to do that day. It impacted all the work I had to do. I was unable to work optimally for a few days. I had control of only my attitude.

Your attitude determines how you respond to missed deadlines, employee illness, delayed payments from clients and the list of problems you will face as a business owner. Control your attitude because everything else is the illusion of control.

4. BUT THE ONLY OTHER THING YOU CONTROL MIGHT BE EXPENSES

If you get into a room with fellow entrepreneurs who decide to be very honest with you in their assessment of the things that are working or not working about their business they will, to the last person working on an early stage company, confess to you, that they are not quite sure about revenue projections. You can rest easy knowing that revenue projections early on are a shot in the dark, especially when you’ve not figured out your customer acquisition or your go-to-market strategy.

If those same entrepreneurs decide to continue being honest with you they will tell you that the only thing they are sure about is that expenses will fall into several buckets and, without looking at their books, they should have a sense for those numbers. This is because expenses are truly based on decisions that you make about your business. You control your expenses. Whether it is higher or lower than you wanted it to be boils down to decisions you made for what and where you would spend the money. It is allocated based on where you think the money should go to keep the business going. Take control of those expenses and watch it diligently. It’s one part of the business that you can truly hold by the horns and steer in the direction you need it to go.

5. FRAME YOUR BUSINESS BECAUSE THE MARKET HAS…

It’s amazing how all it takes to make something palatable, even desirable, is framing. If you were to be told that you should sit in uncomfortable chairs by the expressway and watch cars drive at crazy speeds for about 5 hours, you would look at the person asking as if they were crazy. But that’s what people pay thousands of dollars to do watching Formula 1.

In the same way, decide on how your business will be perceived by customers and partners and consistently communicate that in all your materials and engagements. It’s also as much about consistency as it is about the message. I’ve heard it said that perception is reality. Perception is built by consistently saying something as you believe it is. In working with entrepreneurs I’ve heard the frustration ‘but that’s not what we do!!’ when they see some press about their product/service. My response tends to be ‘but the market doesn’t know that yet’. Tell them, tell them and tell them again.

6. TOMORROW IS TOO LATE TO EMPOWER YOUR TEAM

Leave your people, whom you’ve hired and trust, to do the work they’ve been hired to do. The real issue comes if you do not trust the people you’ve hired to do the work you’ve brought them in to do. I’ve had conversations with business owners that started off with the owners complaining about employees not doing the work they were hired to do. The conversations end with an admission that they always had a feeling that they shouldn’t have hired the person or they worried about the person in the early days.

As a leader you should know and trust that the person you are bringing on to your team can and will do the work that is required. Those doubts never go away as you will focus on and over- emphasize the things they ‘do wrong’. When you have any doubts about that you should not hire the person. When you do trust the person, let them do the work without your prying hands and eyes.

7. TECHNOLOGY IS NEVER THE ‘TRUE’ SOLUTION

Most enquiries I receive from founders tend to go a certain way;

They’ve identified a problem
They’ve spent some time researching
They’ve spent some time building the product or developing the service.
But the customers are not signing up!! ‘Please help!’ They scream.

The first thing I point out to them is the problem they identified is probably wrong. And that they’ve built a technology solution that solves the wrong problem. If they manage to come back to me and convince me that the problem they solved is the correct one then we move on to whether they’ve truly nailed their customer segments or reached these segments through the correct channels. I don’t focus on the technology except it’s game changing stuff which, to be honest, most ideas aren’t.

Most technology is either buildable, being built or will be built. The thing is, technology by itself, even with the buzzword tech these days (AI, Blockchain etc) does not solve the problem your customer has. Not until you’re clear about that problem/need. The mistake most founders make is that they think technology itself is the solution. It isn’t.

8. INSTINCT PLAYS A BIGGER ROLE THAN WE ADMIT…

If I had a dollar for every time a business owner has mentioned to me that ‘if I’ve trusted my instinct, I’d have done it this other way” I would be pretty wealthy by now. What I suggest to them is that they should trust their instincts but only when the decision is time constrained. See, instinct tends to be biased and overconfident if it is the only data point we use to make decisions. A lot of research has gone into when we should trust our gut and two points are suggested

situations of low turbulence and high structure (i.e not for stockpicking) and
When the situation allows you to get feedback and use that feedback to improve your decision making so that, should there come a similar situation in the future, you’ve improved your chances of making an instinct-based decision in the future.

One of the other points, as suggested by Daniel Kahneman is that instinct is partly honed by data and information you’ve received and stored away over time. Its a reserve of data that nudges you in a certain way when a decision is to be made. Use it as part of a set of tools for making decisions. But never as the sole tool. We don’t do it consciously, that’s why it’s instinctual.

9. STRONG OPINIONS WEAKLY HELD.

Similar to the point above about instinct, we all come into our businesses with pretty strong opinions — lawyers are all shady, customers do not know what they want when it comes to groundbreaking technology, I can be a CEO because I have the same pedigree or no pedigree like visionary entrepreneur XYZ, I’ve done this before so I know how, poor consumers will benefit from the product because they are poor — and these opinions play a big part in decision making. This is actually a small problem. When we meet the real world with our ideas and they are challenged or corrected we course correct and get rid of some of these opinions.

Where the problem lies is when we do not change these strong opinions even when we are presented with new and more credible information. ‘Strong opinions, weakly held’, which is credited to Paul Saffo, is the only way to think about this. In a world where there is more information about every and anything we need than at any point in our lives, we should let the ability to learn and find out better information than we have to always trump any opinions we hold about business or the market. Especially when this new information comes from the mouth of your true customers.

That being said, along with this willingness to let more information through we will have to develop better filters for what is good and/or bad advice. It’s a filter that we are as yet ill-equipped to use optimally — there has never been this much access to information — but one we already have. Yes, our ability to ignore information is almost as good as our ability to consume information. We’ve been made to ignore information that is either irrelevant, useless at the moment or harmless. We now have fewer flight or fight situations in our daily existence. This is also the case with business decisions, it’s never life/death when you assess in hindsight.

10. 7 YEARS IS NOW A LONG TIME.

When building a business, it’s often said that things take twice as long as you projected for anything to happen. It’s a slog. I recount the 5.5yrs it took to get Power2switch off the ground/sold and I say it ‘was 5.5years that felt like 20’.

But even in the cycle of business, 5.5yrs is now feeling like a long time. Before it would take 5 years to figure out what your business is doing. Now, as technology advancements increase the pace of innovation, we are starting to see the shortening of the lifecycle of businesses. You have more opportunities to cycle through business models. The paths to market are a lot clearer as information becomes more readily available.

An example will help here. The contracting process to sell your product or service into the Army or Navy takes about twelve months, similar to the utility industry, but with the availability of the so simple technology of submission uploads online and simpler decision making processes, the cycle is now circa 90 days. And don’t even talk about how quickly you can cycle through customer tests online.

I’m not saying here that it takes a shorter time to build a business. I’m just suggesting that you can find out if you are serving a real need or solving a real problem in less time than we used to need.

11. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PROMISES YOU MAKE…

I’m a big believer in keeping promises; when you keep your legitimate promises you become trustworthy and trust is the most valuable currency in your interaction between customers and your product/service. We now trust Apple products because there is a promise that they will be well designed, we trust Zappos to deliver quickly, we trust Walmart to be cheap.

In building your business you are making three core promises.

The product promise to your customers: once you put a product/service in the market, you make a promise to help customers satisfy one of their hierarchy of needs. This comes from clearly understanding your customer’s needs, which you can control. Once this promise is kept, then you are in business because people are paying for your product or service and your business thrives. It’s the simplest, most important but also most complicated promise to keep.
The fulfillment promise to your team/employees: people come to share and work with you to achieve your vision of a business that will satisfy #1 above. Ensure that you provide them the best experience so they achieve their full potential.
The promise to yourself: you wake up every morning and promise to give your best effort to whatever it is you do. In the context of a team if we all keep that promise to ourselves then it allows us achieve #2 (a powerful thing when all on the team are aligned) and consequently #1.

Regardless of the noise you hear as you work on your business, this hierarchy that places the focus on delivering a promise to your customers should stand and hold you through the tough days. And it should humble you on those days when you start to think you are awesome.

Never forget the promises.

12. THINGS ARE NEVER AS BAD OR AS GOOD…

A few years ago a wise and successful man told me,

‘Looking at possible scenarios, the result of the decision you are about to make will probably not be as terrible as you worry it will be, as long as you don’t die as a result’ (Paraphrased)

I’d gone to him for counsel about a decision I was about to make regarding my business and at that point I walked away thinking ‘this rich older lawyer friend/smart advisor has no clue what I am going through. What a waste of my time!!! How can he be so clueless!?!”

But he was right.

It’s been a few years since the conversation and I do not actually remember what imminent catastrophe I was worrying about. I’ve had similar conversations with colleagues/friends/family and time and time again. Life has proven that things are never as bad or as good as we imagine them to be before we get into the situation. It’s only in hindsight that we realize this and by then we have moved on to worrying about the next thing.

As I mentioned earlier, the information you have at the moment when you have a decision to make is almost always inadequate. It is this inadequacy of the information that makes the situation seem more critical than it truly is. Not to suggest that there are no life/death decisions in business, what I do know now is that, things will not have the same weight with the benefit of hindsight even if it turned out poorly for you or your business.

13. GIVE ME VALUES OR GIVE ME (BUSINESS) DEATH!!

You should feel comfortable leaving your team in charge of helping you bring your dream to life. The big problem is finding people that you have no concerns about what decisions they will make when you are not there. Will they cut corners to help you achieve your goals? You want to hire people that share your values because these values are foundational. Your values are central to your business, they are the ‘Why’ you do what you do everyday. You want people who share the same ‘Why’.

If you fail to hire people that match your value system as the business owner, regardless of how much expertise and experience they have in the roles you want them to play, there will come a point where that mismatch will cost your business. Most likely it will cost your business trust. Trust takes a long time to build but a moment to lose. You want to be able to walk out of the office knowing that every single person in there will do things that align with your values. Even if they do it wrong, you will know they did it for the right reasons.

14. YOU’VE GOT A STORY TO TELL…

Great leaders and successful business people very carefully think about their companies, bust their guts to see it come to life and augment it with, what I think is the killer sauce, a compelling narrative that combines their personal stories with the business.

Think about it; Mohamed Yunus of Grameen Bank, Oprah Winfrey, Coco Chanel, Henry Ford, Sara Blakely of Spanks, Estée Lauder, pick a Gandhi, Richard Branson, etc and the master of the narrative Steve Jobs. We think of all these leaders as much for their products/services as we do for the narrative they crafted around said product or service. It is that compelling narrative that elevates the whole package into an unforgettable part of a customer’s consciousness.

Being a storyteller does not always work, especially if your product does not serve a user’s needs, but your inability as a business owner to sell the story of why you are doing what you are doing and who you are is a surefire way to failure. I guarantee it.

Show me a business person who fails to craft his or her story and I will show you a business that will not be around for too long. While the concept of storytelling is not as prevalent as it should be in business, there is a movement towards strategic narratives; an approach to sharing the company strategy through compelling and memorable strategic narration. It’s just the business way of packaging stories because, businesses are recognizing that we all need stories. We all have stories. Better get used to storytelling if you want to stand out above the crowd.

15. YOUR BUSINESS IS YOU. BUT IT ISN’T YOU.

Products and businesses ooze their founders’ idiosyncrasies. No founder trait is wholly good or wholly bad. It’s actually two sides of the same coin. In the same way our individual strengths are our individual weaknesses, the company’s strengths are as much its weaknesses.

Understated, ambitious, super creative and persistent are traits that characterize a friend of mine. She is busy tackling the organic and non-GMO markets with a technology product that requires she bring all four of those traits I just listed to the table.

Irreverent, curious and engaging. You see that when you walk into the office of a friend who is all this and more. And you see it in the approach the company is taking towards tackling the mobile commerce market. The founder is the business, the business is the founder. Especially if they bring their most honest self to work every single day.

Be aware of this and let your team know. They will mimic it whether they know it or not, brutal honesty makes the work easier so when they see who YOU are showing up in how the business is run/works, they are prepared and (hopefully) OK with that.

16. YOU CAN HAVE TOO MANY ADVISORS.

When my cofounder (Phil) and I went through Excelerate Chicago (now Techstars Chicago) we were warned that we would have about 100 meetings over the course of a month. We ended up with close to 80 meetings. It was crazy and intense. We had to divide and conquer to avoid the stress of being overwhelmed by that number of meetings.

More dangerous than the sheer number of meetings was the advice we got from those meetings. It came in all shapes and sizes and forms. Some of them still stick out to me — the great ones and the horrible ones — but for the most part they were all based on the perspectives and experiences of the advisor. I still keep in touch with the exceptionally good ones. When Phil and I would huddle up early the next day to compare notes and debrief, we were shocked to see so many conflicting pieces of advice. Sometimes from the same person!!! Thankfully the folk at Excelerate had warned us about mentor whiplash as it came to be known.

This story has become one I share with founders when they pitch me and pull up a slide with more advisors than actual team members! You don’t need that many advisors. They lend little to no credibility to your business if you have not launched a product yet. And lend even less credibility if you’ve launched a product and you are spending less time talking to your customers than the time you are spending talking to your advisors.

17. YOU HAVE ADVISORS? IGNORE THEM.

Some advisors will know nothing about your business nor will they actually have expertise in building a business. Worse still, they might actually not get your business.

But they hang around because they collect advisory badges like squirrels collect nuts.

These folk talk the talk but have never walked the walk.

They come under the guise of offering you assistance.

Even though they don’t quite understand your business.

But they know you need help.

So they’ll stick around.

Sometimes they’ll ask for a fee. Sometimes they’ll ask for a fee for introducing you to people who can get or give you money.

Steer clear of these folk.

Most importantly, ignore their advice!

18. YOU HAVE ADVISORS? LISTEN TO THEM.

Some advisors will know nothing about your business but they have expertise in building a business. Or businesses.

It’s difficult for you to get on their calendars because they are busy.

They have walked the walk and have anecdotes that display their empathy.

They make introductions. Even though they probably still don’t quite understand your business.

But they know you need help.

Follow up on the introductions they make.

They’ll never ask you for anything. What they gain from this is fulfillment.

Seek these people out.

Work with them till they get it.

They will become your lifelong friends and mentors.

Thank them. Pay it forward.

19. YOU MIGHT NOT BE CEO MATERIAL. YET.

Be intellectually honest with yourself, you might not be CEO material.

During the days of Power2Switch, because I had founded the company, I took the title of CEO. I was so uncomfortable with the title I renamed it to Chief Electricity Officer. I didn’t really enjoy playing that role and consequently I didn’t enjoy engaging with the investors. I figured out how to do it effectively and surrounded myself with a few folk who were also CEOs (peers and mentors alike) and learned how to. What I truly enjoyed was jumping on calls with customers to learn more about their needs and translating that into wireframes and sketches that the team could build. That gave me immense joy because my strongest strength is empathy. I enjoyed helping out the team and making sure I had the pulse of the team. That I thoroughly enjoyed doing.

If you read this and thought “who are you to tell me I might be a bad CEO?” it doesn’t mean you are material, you might be better and self-conscious but you might not be.

If this made you pause and consider that then really consider it and focus on the part of the business where your super powers might be best applied.

Frankly there are many CEOs out there. I asked one of our investors (later on) and, he made me realize I might find more joy and fulfillment in working with a small company as a product, technology or strategy guy. It was a relief to hear that and know that he did not think any less of me for admitting that I might be better suited for another role.

You’re no less an entrepreneur if you’re #5, #20, #60 at a company…

20. WHEN PEOPLE TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE, LISTEN.

The quote above is a paraphrase of Maya Angelou’s quote. It applies to life. She could have been saying it about business.

Many partners, customers, team members and people you engage with as you build your business show you who they truly are very early on in the relationship. Your task is to listen carefully.

And by listening I mean, watch, observe, ask other people and stay aware of what their motivations are.

Because when the relationship truly gets to the rocky times those attributes they showed you early on? It’s all bound to be amplified in the bad times.

This applies to you too in your relationship with people. The best leaders are unable to hide who they truly are. In you becoming a great leader, you want to be authentically you and let people know the true you. This authentic you will seep into your company culture and into the service or product that you deliver. It will attract the customers that value what you value and repel the customers who were going to cause you problems anyway.

So it’s pretty important; when people tell you who they are, LISTEN!

21. EXECUTION ALWAYS LOSES TO POOR STRATEGY. ALWAYS.

‘Speed is irrelevant if you are traveling in the wrong direction.’ Gandhi

When it really comes down to it, there are only three initial paths you can take as a startup founder.

Cost leadership: low cost provider in your space
Differentiation: providing a unique product
Focus/niche: pick a segment (geography, market or product)

At some points, during the Power2Switch days, we tried doing all three in parallel. We never quite achieved our full potential doing that.

To bring a product to market with one of these three is not innovative regardless of how you finesse it on a pitch deck or try to convince a customer. Where your business gets interesting is in combining two of the three approaches to create something that can be (truly) considered innovative. Act accordingly.

Failing to choose properly, you’ll fall for any shiny thing and even the best execution will lead you down the wrong path. A path where you might not learn lessons that can be applied towards success with the right strategy.

22. YOU WILL ABSOLUTELY PRICE IT WRONG AT THE BEGINNING.

I’m yet to meet an entrepreneur who figured out her pricing correctly from the start of her business. Even when you are basing your pricing on a competitor’s price, you have little insight into the components of that price and what you have is an indication of what value they are willing to extract from the market. It might not be the correct value for you to extract from the market. Be prepared to price it wrong.

At Power2switch, we charged much lower than we could have to get into the business. We took this approach to get the contracts from the electricity suppliers and get a foothold on one side of our marketplace.

But…

23. …BUT YOU CAN ALWAYS CHANGE YOUR PRICING.

…to adjust for the mistakes we made at the beginning of the business we started to price new contracts a bit closer to what we were comfortable with receiving. Since the promise of our service was fairness in comparison of electricity prices to customers, we had the leverage to go back to suppliers to say we would need to reprice to ensure all our customers saw pricing on our platform that was Apple-to-Apples comparisons to the other suppliers who provided us prices to display. The suppliers all agreed. We’d priced too low from the beginning any way…

Even though you priced it wrong at the beginning of the business, you can always reprice your product or service. As you learn more about your inputs and costs, you can start to determine how much value you are willing to extract from customers. Better yet, you can now start to ask customers what they are willing to pay once they have had a chance to experience your product or service.

It is even easier to change your price in a world where technology enables you to show different prices to different customers for the same product.

24. I KNOW SOMETHING YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW!

Some news came out about our industry, the retail electricity markets, and I remember getting a call from one of our investors. I hadn’t provided the investor group information on the changes and he had found out more information than he thought I had. Truth be told, I was still gathering the details so I could strip away the emotion I was feeling from the new info, and I was not ready to give my views. We had a good call where he helped me think through the information I had gathered. He reminded me that they did not expect me to know everything. He just expected me to know more than they did. He expected me to be learning constantly and stay updated.

A learning mindset does not consider what it doesn’t know as failure. It considers what it doesn’t know as new knowledge. It accepts that knowledge is not absolute and seeks to fill gaps of information to make decisions that will take the load of her employees. This is the best state you can be in as an entrepreneur. It means you continue to seek the knowledge about your customer, your business and the opportunity you are trying to capture. Sometimes that information will come from unexpected places. That’s ok. What matters is that you are constantly seeking that information out and you stay learning.

25. WE’RE ALL JOURNEY PEOPLE.

There are some threads of character that recur in the people that inspire me on this business building journey. These entrepreneurs are inspiring because even after they’ve failed or succeeded in their business they do not talk about the ‘what’. They still focus on the ‘why’ of the business they built or tried to build.

The successful ones measure their success not by the money they’ve made but on the impact their product or service has/had. The money made is just a good perk. The ones who ‘failed’ are saddened not by how little money they made but, by how their product or service was not as impactful as they hoped it would be.

The whole ‘entrepreneurship’ thing for them was not/is still not about the ‘celebrity’ (I’m thinking through a much longer post on the Hollywoodization of this whole entrepreneurial journey and the unintended damage it is doing).

These people all do it for fulfillment…nothing wrong with doing it for money. I just find it’s uninspiring to the ones who’ve made the most money doing it.

Ask yourself, Why am I on this journey?

26. HEALTHY DOSE OF OPTIMISTIC REALISM…

The ‘Urban Dictionary’ suggests that an Optimistic Realist is

‘someone who is able to look at the positive side of life while maintaining a realistic viewpoint‘

I’ll stick with that definition because it says it all. It’s about knowing that the journey to building your business will not be a smooth one but you choose to remain optimistic despite the prevailing circumstance. Since all you control is your attitude, even if your business fails, up until it does, I want to suggest that you should remain optimistic but realistic about what the outcome is at that exact point you find yourself in.

What does optimistic realism look like in the day-to-day life of a business owner? It’s accepting that even when you did not sell one product today, it does not mean your business will fail. It’s understanding that as many rejections as you get from customers that you believe are your true customer, you are getting closer to the true need that people have. Optimistic realism looks a lot like you being intellectually honest enough with yourself to know that, maybe you are not selling the right product or providing the right service. But that it does not mean you are doomed to failure forever.

27. NO PRODUCT? AND YOU HAVE A COO?!? WTF!!

If you are a team of a few people trying to get a product out to the market, the titles you hold as individual members of the team do not mean anything. Those titles are not worth the weight of the business cards you printed them on.

What should matter at this stage of the business is how well you have split tasks and assigned accountability. This is not to say everyone focuses solely on the one task that might be their responsibility. To do that is to create a toxic culture that will lead to the failure of the business. What it means that you are all aware of who owns what and can assist that person as needed to ensure tasks get completed.

If more attention is being paid to the business card embossed titles, then there are bigger problems and questions to be dealt with. And one of them is

‘why did you even print business cards????’

28. YOU NEED A BOGEYMAN!

When we were running Power2Switch, it was easy for us to rally the team or the customers to our side because the bad guy/bogey man was the incumbent utility who had failed to provide good quality service and cheap electricity for consumers. The consumers were yearning for a savior who would enable them to get what they wanted and, once we came along looking all cuddly and cute with our mascots, it was easy for everyone to adopt us as their hero and defender. What most customers did not know is that we as a company depended on the utility to enable us do what we did. We had to plug into the utility database to enable us customize the monthly reports that our customers got from us, which was part of why they loved us so much, and if that plug had been pulled by the big-bad-utility it would have prevented us from being able to serve our customers so well.

In fact, in states where we could not pull data from the utility with the ease with which we could in our home state our service did not have the same sleekness and, consequently, we did not get the same level of love from the customers in those states. This resulted in fewer sign ups, lower retention and an overall level of quality that diluted our service to a large degree. In those states we did not have a bogey man (either there was no utility or the utility already played a similar role to the one we played).

You need a bogeyman/woman or a boss to battle. It becomes a rallying cry for you and your team.

29. ONLY ONE EQUATION TRULY MATTERS.

REVENUE — EXPENSES = PROFIT/LOSS

As much as we live in a world where it feels like there are different methods and ways to assess whether a company is doing well or not, there is still one metric that determines whether a business will survive in the long term and that is whether the business is doing things that ensure that it is making more money than it is spending. Especially in the early days when you’re spending house money.

It might not be the reason why you are in business, in a not-for-profit for example, but at the end of the day your ability to keep the lights on in the business is determined by whether you continue to bring in more money (in whatever way shape or form) than you are spending. Technology enables us to mask or delay the need to answer this question but I can assure you that, for example, the reason why Pinterest or Snap focus on amassing millions of users is because there will come a point when the goal will be to make more money from having those users than it costs to manage those users. This does not change for your because you are a small company. It will determine your survival or otherwise.

30. PATENTS? SCHMATENTS!

Do not waste your time and money on trying to get a patent or a trademark until you are sure that your product solves a need that more than your friends and family have.

There is only one exception to this rule and it is if you truly think the differentiator is a future technology that will become dominant in a future you have little view into. An example is developing a lithium ion battery in a period where that is all the rage and you spend time working on a patent for your product. The externality of a new technology, e.g. nuclear fission, will make your patent pointless and it would have had nothing to do with the competition or anyone you were expecting would want to ‘steal’ your technology. You are better served spending your time building out your technology and executing on getting it to market to compete against both the known and unknown competitive forces out there.

When does it make sense to spend money on a patent? When you are generating a lot more money than it will cost you to file for a patent that will take five years to obtain. Your lawyer will suggest you get a patent. Guess what? That’s his job!!! Of course he’ll tell you to get a patent. Your job is to tell him no.

31. FLOW? SERVED ONCE A DAY, THRICE A WEEK.

You’ve heard of or experienced flow. It’s that point where the work just seems to be happening without you having to think about what you are doing. It’s coming from a place of complete immersion in the act. Every part of you is in sync to produce the output you desire.

The myth is that flow happens. That you cannot control it, it just comes if you immerse yourself and work up to that state.

That’s not true. That’s why it’s a myth. Flow can be conditioned and switched on when you want it to happen. I’ve spoken to a few super productive entrepreneurs who’ve been able to deconstruct the times when they’ve found themselves in flow and determined how to recreate it.

This is how it works for me. When working I listen to music. When I do not have any hard deadlines or actions that I need to complete urgently before the end of that day, I can just listen to most songs and never really get into flow.

But when I do have urgent work, especially when it comes to writing, that I need to get done and I want to switch on my flow, I have some particular songs that I will listen to on repeat. Yes, I will listen to one song over and over again between the hours of 8:30 and 12 noon. Right now, as I type this, that song is Christian Scott’s ‘The Eraser’ which is the only song I will listen to all night as I finish this book.

Deconstruct your flow. Switch it on when needed. Rinse and repeat thrice a week.

32. EVEN INTROVERTS DO IT IN THE DARK.

While there are some traits that might be considered as symptomatic of successful people — hard worker being the most recurring one — there are no personalities that immediately lend themselves to what would predict success in a business endeavor. I have met as many laid back introvert entrepreneurs, as I have met the outlandish over the top extrovert entrepreneurs. I have met these people in equal measure and with varying levels of success (at least based on the metrics of business success that we agree on for the purposes of this book).

While personality types do not determine success, personality types matter in what style of leadership or followership will be required to work successfully with some of certain personality types. There is inherent friction in some working styles, what you want to look for in a leader is to ensure that the frictions you face with your teammate have little to do with the differences you have between their personalities and yours. As mentioned before, it is necessary to know what quirks of your style are seeping into your company and to hire accordingly. Both for your success and for the fulfillment of the people you bring into your fold.

33. CYCLE ON, CYCLE OFF

As we all know, it is hard to start and build a business. It is emotional and physical. It is great and it is horrible. While this is the case, you must be well aware of the tides of your industry as a whole and determine whether the difficulty of building your business is because of something you are doing as part of the grind and the work or it is because there is something fundamentally wrong with the market as a whole that is preventing the growth of your business. I’ve worked with entrepreneurs who are building simple businesses in sectors (healthcare, utility etc), where the business cycle is one that is moving towards the bundling of that industry.

All industries go through the cycles of bundling (few large players who control most of the market) and unbundling (many small players using technology to disrupt the marketplace and carve out a share of the market for themselves). If your industry is going through the bundling phase and you are trying to unbundle, it will prove more difficult than if you were trying to ride the wave of the trend towards unbundling that is bound to come. This is not to suggest that the unbundling period is the only time to start a business, this is just a guide that helps you assess where you are and what actions you should be taking with your business to determine where and on what you want to spend your energy knowing that the cycle might be for or against you.

Act accordingly.

34. FIND ONE THING THAT CANNOT BE COPIED. ONE…

When you hear investors talk about unique value proposition the immediate reaction that most early stage entrepreneurs have is that this must relate to technology. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier on, unless you are like the very few technologist who can come up with new technology that has never been built before, you will not be able to truly claim that unique value proposition. But this should be no reason to despair and stop the business. If what it takes to get you to stop your business is someone else telling you so, you probably should not be working on it anyway.

What you need to look for is something that is truly and uniquely you. It can or cannot have anything to do with the product or service you are offering. All it needs is for it to be truly yours. Uniquely yours. It could be in the willingness of you to express your company vision, mission and brand in a way that is totally unique to you. It could be in the way that you interact with the customers who reach out to you. Find some quirk of yours that you accentuate in communicating your company to the world. Even if there are thousands of companies that are doing exactly what you are doing, the unique value proposition can simply be in how you are doing in a manner that is true to you.

35. CROWDED MARKET? DIVE RIGHT IN!

When pitching investors on a business idea, the ideal situation is that there aren’t too many companies already serving the customers or market segment you are interested in. So, many entrepreneurs see a crowded market and choose not to enter.

I say this is nonsense.

Crowded marketplaces are only a problem if you are looking to build a venture capital fundable business that needs to return several millions of dollars to some investor somewhere. If it’s your own business, especially a nice lifestyle business, it’s perfectly OK for the market to be crowded. What you need is a unique proposition, discussed earlier, that allows you to capture some share of the market.

36. IT’S MESSY. THAT’S HOW IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE.

If your attempt to build a business is not messy and confusing I can assure you that you are doing it wrong. It isn’t supposed to be straightforward and simple. It’s like giving birth to a child. It’s extremely uncomfortable for the mother, she’s not really happy to be birthing this human being from out of her. When the baby comes out, it is all messy and bloody and doesn’t look quite right. Then the baby gets cleaned up and slapped to ensure it cries (if it’s not already crying). Unfortunately, the mess does not stop there. You change diapers ~3000 times before the baby learns to clean itself. And it’s yours to handle until the baby becomes it’s own fully formed adult and cleans up after itself. It stays messy for a while.

Yours is to create something beautiful out of the mess.

ps: you forgot I was talking about a baby didn’t you? That’s how much your startup consumes you. That’s OK. Make sure you practice self-care.

37. IGNORE YOUR WEAKNESSES

In the early days of your company one of the main things that will separate you from the competition will be how much you harness your strength or strengths. In interactions with a few hundred founders, the focus tends to be on trying to improve the things you are not pretty good at when, to be brutally honest, you will most likely never become top of the world in those things if you are starting from scratch.

An example I see is when a fantastic business or sales founder finds herself trying to learn how to code because she believes she needs to build the product herself. She takes herself away from her strength, failing to wrack up the 10k hours she needs to become an expert at sales, and spends three months at a bootcamp to learn the intricacies of front end development. It’s all excitement in month one as she starts to learn something like rails, and then she realizes she needs to learn 10 other things. And then for each of those 10 she realizes she need 10 other things. A rabbithole!

A better approach would have been to focus on selling the vision to a developer who could help her build the platform in a shorter time frame than it would take, and in the meantime the developer starts to rack up her 10k hours, to get to a product that gives the expert salesperson an opportunity to truly test if the product solves the needs of the customers.

Focus on your strength(s), it’s the expression of this superpower of yours that attracts other superpowered team members onto your team to help you fulfill your dreams for the business.

38. MATCH DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS TO PRODUCT.

Distribution channel and product/service mismatches tend to be a killer of businesses. It’s crazy to think but I have seen companies propose to sell their heavy machinery equipment (for example) through the internet. Or try to sell t-shirts wholesale while claiming they want to build a brand. These channels will work for either of these product examples but when you are building a brand you definitely do not want it hidden behind a nameless distribution channel that provides you no marketing. Do not over complicate this. You should be able to map how customers perceive your product or service to how and where they get it. Unless, and it is rarely so, this is your innovation.

If you want to build a brand you have to get good at marketing and storytelling. If you only care about selling a lot of the product, and you do not care about the brand, then you better find a wholesale channel and get good at business-to-business sales. You have limited resources, use it wisely.

If you show up pitching a business model that is focused on selling a product/service through the wrong distribution channel, you show whomever you are pitching to that you do not truly understand your business.

39. YOU HAVE TWO JOBS.

Forget all the time wasting activities that will come your way. All the work you do in the early days of your business can be divided into two buckets.

Is it bringing buying customers through the door, to the site or to the app
Is it bringing cash into the bank?

You have only two jobs to do. This is especially useful for the early days.

For #1 there is busy work, like setting up distribution channels for a product that isn’t even finished yet and you are not sure whether it serves the need of the customer, and there is work that serves the real purpose, like jumping on a call with your target customer to clarify what their needs are. The more time you spend on busy work the more stress you feel. That stress is less about the work and more about the fact that you are no closer to achieving #1.

The less you achieve #1 the more time you have to spend on other methods of bringing money into the business e.g. fundraising from investors. Unfortunately, if you aren’t doing much to achieve #1, there is next to zero chance that the investors you are engaging with will care much for giving you money to continue doing what you are doing. It’s easy to spot entrepreneurs who are busy doing busy work. No one wants to facilitate or fund your continued business. They want to fund you building a business that sells to customers exactly what they need…

40. MOST OF THE ADVICE YOU GET WILL BE GARBAGE.

Advice comes with the baggage, context, biases, experiences, idiosyncrasies, social status, desires, aspirations, knowledge, lack of knowledge, confusions, answered questions and unanswered questions of the person who is giving you that advice.

You will have to filter through your baggage, context, biases, experiences, idiosyncrasies, social status, desires, aspirations, knowledge, lack of knowledge, confusions, answered questions and unanswered questions to determine which advice makes sense to you and your business.

The work is not in finding advice. The work is in finding the gem within the heap of garbage you are bound to receive from the people who will line up to let you know what they think about your idea if you ask them (and even if you don’t).

This applies to every single one of the lessons above. These are the lessons I learned from my experience as the founder of Power2switch and from engaging with hundreds of entrepreneurs over the last 10 or so years. They might be useful for you. Or they might not. I do hope it’s the former and not the latter

Thanks for reading and all the best on your journey…

https://medium.com/@seyi_fab/40-semi-obvious-startup-lessons-604f769bb6b

Seyi Fabode