You won’t believe how I earned 100k in 10 days. Ten easy ways to close deals immediately. How I used Chat gpt to 100x my business …
The net is full of clickbait crap like this, and there is a cacophony of pages with lukewarm, non specific advice within the echo chamber of self declared business gurus who reiterate the same topics and “knowledge” that currently is trending. Same with pretty much every topic, actually.
To be clear, you can not teach someone how to run a new business. That’s why the majority of e.g. medium articles, startup incubator articles and business page writings on entrepreneurship are ultimately shallow in actual, practical advice. Also, it’s better to keep it vague so that you can sell a product along the user journey. (But that’s another story.)
*end of rant
Acknowledging that you have to figure out what works for your business one step at a time opens an interesting question — how can you get feedback on your work & thinking that drastically improves your self-reflection? Preferably so much that you can connect all the wobbly dots in your business only you understand, to take the next steps towards success.
There are many ways how to get better at starting a company, a lot has to do with self organisation and using systems, models and structured thinking. I'll give you two ideas how to get started. One method we as founders can use to challenge our assumptions is the reality check. A more model based approach that works well is inverse framings.
Reality checks: Someone who looks at the system you create from the outside as observer and describes objectively what they see. For personal development this is usually more a sort of top down feedback from someone who has been there and is not in currently the trenches with you. For instance mentors, advisors, an entrepreneurial friend, a partner... Unfiltered, straight to our faces objective feedback of what we do and what they think are risks with this approach.
For you business you can dissect different sections with specialists, like financial advisors, or, if you are early like our startup is, an experienced entrepreneur who looks at the setup as a whole.
That is not meant to you following blindly any advice, obviously. It means listening, hearing them, asking questions and then think about what that means for you, how it improves your vision etc.
If you are deep in the product development you tend to overlook massive flaws, especially from the customer side, because you know what the idea behind some design choices are. Customers don't. For instance, our onboarding mails in our mail-flow had directly conflicting information from mail 2 to mail 3. We only realised it once we hired a new guy that did the onboarding process and was utterly confused what he had to do.
The second is inverse framings, thus, framing the way of what not to do. The idea is to understand what measures will certainly lead to failure, analyse the risk and probability of these events and then create a strategy that these things never happen. It is a version of the “kill our company” scenario planning, a fun strategic exercise where you think about a future where your company failed and then retrace the steps of what you did wrong that led to that failure. The inverse framing is more mid- oder short-term.
For instance, we will not reach our ARR sales goals if we keep loosing this many customers each month -> We have to reduce churn.
People will not activate their accounts if the messages in the onboarding emails are confusing them -> Simplify onboarding process.
I will burnout if I do all my customer support mails on the weekend. → Take time off to recover.
You get the point.
Use these to get a birds eye view from someone that is not in the trenches with you.
My first reality check was simplifying and reducing the amount of OKRs/KPIs by focusing on 2 objectives only. Cashflow and conversion rate. We needed the conversion rate to see which campaigns were successful and to see which sales approaches worked.
Building a business all the way from scratch is way more multi-dimensional than you can imagine.
You have to understand how to build a product, how to market, brand, label and communicate it, how to sell, pitch, announce and hype it, but also how to create the business and operations itself, how to hire, pay and fire people, how to lead a team, your taxes and finances, you have to understand cash that comes in and cash that goes out and what these numbers mean.
On top of that you have to learn how to manage yourself, your time, energy and health as well as your personal life, love and friendships, and so on.
Reverse Framing influenced how we worked in teams.
Usually, we had the approach that we tried stuff until something worked, and then repeated that thing.
But you can get stuck pretty bad with this. So we needed a way to frame our approaches differently. When I took over our sales to build up a proper sales process, I started with such a weaknesse-framing. I phrased ways how we will not reach our goals, how we will fail, how we will loose the team, how we will burn out and so on. The more concrete, the better.
Then I started drafting a strategy how we can succeed by not doing these things.
This helped the team understand what we have to do because they knew the consequences what happens if we don't do it.
Building a business is hard, no matter the models and structures you use.
If you build a business from the ground up, stuff happens along the way which absorbs mentally and adds unnecessary hours to a workweek.
Obviously, there are only so so many business models that are possible for your project, and a lot of mistakes can be found over and over again, yes. But ultimately, you have to learn how to adapt it to your customer base and business yourself.
I failed to understand this during my first years of my journey - and then some more. There is a reason I don't own a space exploration company. (Ok, maybe several reasons)
Having a board member advising you or even an external mentor can really help you to not forget the longterm vision. It keeps you grounded in the reality of what you actually should be doing or how it looks like from the outside. This is worth more than any template out there.
Anyway, thanks for trusting me with your time,
Cheers
Andreas