You’ve got to be in the game if you want to win – I have not yet seen an entrepreneur who makes a success of their endeavor while doing it as their “other job”. I’m sure there are those that have made it happen but it starts to get into the category of having luck be your strategy and while you’d rather by lucky than smart every day of the week, luck is a really bad strategy to invest in. Your competitors are people who are pouring their heart and soul into their endeavor so no matter how novel your idea is for now (novelty is fleeting), you are losing ground to the ones who are in it.
The thing they don’t really teach you in business school is that a huge percentage of what you need to know to win at an entrepreneurial endeavor are things that you absolutely cannot know from the research you do on Google during your spare time. A lot of what you need to know to be successful, you don’t – and can’t – know before you are actually trying to make your thesis (idea) work. For example, it’s very hard to get real user feedback on a product without actually showing them the product in a scenario that closely approximates real life. Describing the product concept on a white board is not nearly as useful as seeing real customers using your product – or not using it – in real life. And no, focus groups won’t solve this. Save your money.
You also can’t really show your customers a half baked product that you built in your spare time and expect that what you learn there will tell you whether or not you can now safely quit your job. If you’ve built something bad, it’s likely because you did not put enough time into it in the first place; that pesky full time job again interfering with your being fully creative on the product. If your customers kind of like your product, you won’t be able to actually make use of their feedback effectively and rapidly if you have other work commitments. And you almost certainly won’t have enough data from that first interaction with your customers to know whether you now have hit the home run so it’s safe to quit your job and get in the game. That’s not the way startups work. Success is not what happens to you – it’s what you make happen.
The way you derisk a startup is by having a good thesis to start, doing a lot of work to validate your thesis, learning constantly, improving constantly and doing it again and again over a long period of time. Innovate (it starts here – your customers won’t do this for you), get feedback, stop doing the things that are not working, do more of what is, add in a small number of new unproven things, repeat. and again. and again. You get the point.
