Trust is the currency of social capital. Trust is built slowly over repeated interactions where founders take the actions and deliver the results that they had promised. Unlike financial capital, trust is hard to quantify, store, transfer, and accumulate.
This newsletter is devoted to practical advice for entrepreneurs on how to build, borrow, and keep trust.
Building, Borrowing, and Keeping Trust
Keeping trust means you speak and act so that others can have a firm belief in your reliability, truth, and ability.
“Trust is even more scarce than attention” – Seth Godin
Seth Godin on trust: “Trust is scarce because it’s not a simple instinct and it’s incredibly fragile, disappearing often in the face of greed, shortcuts or ignorance… Trust is even more scarce than attention.” Trust doesn’t scale, it’s built up by repeated interactions over time. That’s what makes it so important.
10 Principles for Trust and Integrity from Adventures in Missions
Integrity means making and living up to commitments. Founders create a culture of integrity when they build trust, which is the glue that enables a team to function well.
Shared trust and integrity are essential for the key resource in a startup: morale. Founders must act with integrity and model behavior that builds trust if they hope to prosper.
Build an MVP to Inspire Trust
A minimum viable product (MVP) for a business (B2B), has to inspire trust. They can understand your offer, but if they don’t believe you, they won’t buy. If from your first conversation onward, you make clear commitments and meet them, and you offer relevant case studies and testimonials, then you will immediately start to build trust.
About SKMurphy, Inc.
SKMurphy, Inc. offers customer development services for startup entrepreneurs. We help founders generate leads and close deals to grow your business. Our focus is on early customers and early revenue for technology and expertise products.