The closing slide in our Idea to Revenue Workshop says
In The Beginning…The Founders Are The Business.
To Keep The Business Viable, Learn Faster Than the Competition.
Successful Entrepreneurship Is a Self-Improvement Project.
In the Beginning…the Founders are the Business
When it’s your idea you have to act as if you believe in it and avoid continually seeking validation. Instead ask for criticism and suggestions for how to make it more useful, more valuable, less painful or cumbersome. The hallmark of a serious commitment to a product or service is an active and ongoing search for ways that it could be improved to create more value for a prospect or an existing customer.
Founders normally select the features and then personally develop the first product. In addition–in the early days in particular–they may need to wrap their product in a thick protective coating of personal service to prevent their customers from cutting themselves on “the rough edges of tomorrow” (believe me they can leave some jagged cuts as well as a few dents in a customer’s career).
Either of these situations, whether it’s hearing that your baby is ugly or that you performed unsatisfactorily, can make it difficult to appreciate criticism and ask for more detail. If you can, mentally “stand next to yourself” and pretend that the customer is talking about your twin brother’s mistakes or your co-founder’s product. This may allow you to avoid the trap of explaining to the customer why they have mis-assessed–how many times have you left a demo wondering “I don’t understand, we won the argument: how come we didn’t get their business?“– before you have encouraged more feedback and fully understood their critique.
Related Blog Posts
- Focus On Your Prospect’s Pain Not The Brilliance of Your Product Idea
- I Don’t Understand, We Won the Argument, Why Didn’t We Win The Sale?
- Dorothea Brande’s “Becoming a Writer:” 6 Tips for Entrepreneurs
- More Unsolicited Advice From David Cain Cain identifies four common causes of procrastination: “I’ll do it tomorrow”, “I’ll do it later”,”This is cool–even if it’s not what I set out to get done”, and “I realized I am not good enough to be able to do what I set out to do.”
- Perfectionism vs. Mastery
- Getting Unstuck from Perfectionism
- Appreciate Why Prospects Say,”Your Baby Ugly”
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