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Most entrepreneurs walk around with one very big idea clutched to their chest.
They're convinced it’s their ticket to millions. The one idea that changes everything. Their rocket ship to success.
The problem is, they're usually wrong.
I’m not a big believer in the moonshot approach. When you put everything you’ve got behind a single idea, you're making a big bet without a lot of information. It doesn’t matter how much research you’ve done. You don't know if customers want it yet. You don't know if you can build it and run it profitably, or if the timing is even right.
But a lot of people I know push all of their chips in anyway. YOLO, right?
Wrong.
Smart entrepreneurs are playing a different game. They aren’t swayed by the few outliers that hit it big that way. So, they’re doing something different. They’re running multiple small experiments instead of one giant one. $500 tests, not $50,000 gambles. Weeks to validate, not years.
This works because speed tends to beat perfection. When you put ideas out there often, you learn what's broken in days instead of months. You can pivot and try something different without the sunk cost fallacy messing up your judgment. You can kill bad ideas before they kill your bank account.
Pattern recognition kicks in. After you try three or four different ideas, you start seeing what actual customers respond to versus what you think they want. You develop some data about pricing, messaging, and product features that only come from real-world feedback.
Failure becomes cheap education. When your third experiment flops, you've only lost a few hundred bucks and learned a helluva lot. When your big idea flops? You've lost everything. Your time, your money, and you learned...somehow less.
Taking multiple shots doesn't mean that you lack focus. You're simply finding your focus through experimentation instead of making one giant assumption.
Most successful businesses weren't the founder's first idea. Or second. Or fifth. They landed on something that worked through a process of trial and error, where each "failed" attempt increased the odds that future possibilities would work out. We just hear about those stories a lot less than the person who got it right the first time.
But it’s not your job to be right the first time. Your job is to be wrong as cheaply and quickly as possible until you find what actually works.
Take more shots and make them count. But please make them cheap.
Because in entrepreneurship, like in basketball, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
But you have to be able to afford the shots.
So move fast, try things, get feedback, and save that cash.
Live to shoot another day.
What’s your take on today’s topic? Do you agree, disagree, or is there something I missed?
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Love the Michael Scott quote at the end. My favorite from him is: “I’m not superstitious….. well, I’m a little ‘stitious.”
I love this. Totally agree that validation of an idea is super important -- and to do so in as quick and cheap a manner as possible. All too often I fear people simply fall in love with their own idea -- or get fed false positive reinforcement from others -- and the target customers they thought who would exist in mass fails to materialize. Very sad actually. Especially when there are also tons of companies (e.g., marketing agencies) who'll take anyone's money, make it seem like it's the best idea they've ever heard, and then feign shock when the success doesn't materialize.