The genesis of self-employment (more accurately, customer-employment) is to suffer, that is experience passion. You experience a problem (suffer) in a field you love, and find joy in working on the solution. The finding joy is the part everyone else leaves out, and it is the crucial element in a successful start-up, the joy if it.
So many people fail at start-up for the simple reason is they never learned that there can be joy behind suffering. Add to that the banker's lie that "it takes money to make money" and "entrepreneurship is about risk taking" and people are off track immediately.
Joy in solving a problem trumps the competition.
When the solution works for you it is valid, but is it reliable, will it work for others? Often not, without some tweaking, or in other words, redesign.
All products and services are solutions to problems.
There are no solutions that cannot be improved upon.
It does not take much to achieve the requisite "new" required to launch. As a practical matter you only need enough orders to cover the suppliers minimum production run. With samples you achieve your first warranted order, then based on customer feedback (practical information you may act on) you continuously redesign.
A common error is to imagine one must seize all possible market as soon as possible. This leads people to borrow money to "ramp-up" and lawyer-up with IPR to protect the market, create barriers to entry. This is delusional, since the market is being created as you design, and redesign. Any idea of market outside of that for which you presently hold orders is imaginary, delusional, and people find there is not enough revenue from the frisson of market they imagined to cover the costs of servicing the debts they incurred protecting their imaginary market. A dead give-away someone is delusional is if they initiate contact with a lawyer at any point. If someone mentions "lawyer" quickly ask if he initiated contact with the lawyer, if so, know he is delusional.
The market is created in an organic process of iteration, feedback, iteration, feedback, ad infinitem in joy. There is no forecasting where the product will go. When Jobs started Apple Computer there was no such thing as a phone salesman, and stereo salespeople were one step above used car dealers. Jobs died the number one phone and stereo salesman ever. There was no forecasting that.
The work is a relentless, borne in joy, effort at presentation, feedback, correction, iteration. At no point in the process does an entrepreneur ever take risks. Each iteration is gauged to achieve only enough increase in demand to shorten the time intervals between placing minimum order requirements. At the start-up, small and medium enterprise level, entrepreneurs never seek "economies of scale" only increase of frequency of minimum order transactions. This is the path to thriving.
One commenter declared he saw so many opportunities right now. Really? I cannot see a single one. But I do know there is a process, valid and reliable, for discovering markets that right now remain unserved. I do know the work is rewarding, and there is more work than your being can encompass, or put another way, enough work to exercise every fiber of you mind, heart and soul. I do not think opportunities can be seen in advance, it is more one insinuates oneself into a market by providing a superior value in needful things by design.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
So many people fail at start-up for the simple reason is they never learned that there can be joy behind suffering. Add to that the banker's lie that "it takes money to make money" and "entrepreneurship is about risk taking" and people are off track immediately.
Joy in solving a problem trumps the competition.
When the solution works for you it is valid, but is it reliable, will it work for others? Often not, without some tweaking, or in other words, redesign.
All products and services are solutions to problems.
There are no solutions that cannot be improved upon.
It does not take much to achieve the requisite "new" required to launch. As a practical matter you only need enough orders to cover the suppliers minimum production run. With samples you achieve your first warranted order, then based on customer feedback (practical information you may act on) you continuously redesign.
A common error is to imagine one must seize all possible market as soon as possible. This leads people to borrow money to "ramp-up" and lawyer-up with IPR to protect the market, create barriers to entry. This is delusional, since the market is being created as you design, and redesign. Any idea of market outside of that for which you presently hold orders is imaginary, delusional, and people find there is not enough revenue from the frisson of market they imagined to cover the costs of servicing the debts they incurred protecting their imaginary market. A dead give-away someone is delusional is if they initiate contact with a lawyer at any point. If someone mentions "lawyer" quickly ask if he initiated contact with the lawyer, if so, know he is delusional.
The market is created in an organic process of iteration, feedback, iteration, feedback, ad infinitem in joy. There is no forecasting where the product will go. When Jobs started Apple Computer there was no such thing as a phone salesman, and stereo salespeople were one step above used car dealers. Jobs died the number one phone and stereo salesman ever. There was no forecasting that.
The work is a relentless, borne in joy, effort at presentation, feedback, correction, iteration. At no point in the process does an entrepreneur ever take risks. Each iteration is gauged to achieve only enough increase in demand to shorten the time intervals between placing minimum order requirements. At the start-up, small and medium enterprise level, entrepreneurs never seek "economies of scale" only increase of frequency of minimum order transactions. This is the path to thriving.
One commenter declared he saw so many opportunities right now. Really? I cannot see a single one. But I do know there is a process, valid and reliable, for discovering markets that right now remain unserved. I do know the work is rewarding, and there is more work than your being can encompass, or put another way, enough work to exercise every fiber of you mind, heart and soul. I do not think opportunities can be seen in advance, it is more one insinuates oneself into a market by providing a superior value in needful things by design.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
1 comments:
"By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." Genesis 3:19
There is something primordially satisfying about toiling and suffering to achieve a goal. We've been created this way as the scripture above implies.
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