Enough With Your Boss? Do These 3 Things if You Don’t Want To Go Back to Corporate Life
Entrepreneurship is not an area where you can go blindfolded.
Many people these days want to leave corporate life.
And many people dream about running their own business and become millionaires. Well, some people get what they want but some people fail and go back to old days. After all, anything might happen in business.
But what should we do to increase the odds?
1 - Find a rock solid problem by understanding your entry segment
You have to find a very strong problem that is worth solving.
To find that problem, you can’t rely on your gut feeling, or just quantitative market research. If you have some problems in your mind, that’s fine. Just start testing them by talking to people.
But by talking to people, I don’t mean asking, ‘hey, do you have a malnutrition problem as a bachelor young white collar?’. You have to find the problem by not mentioning the problem. You have to ask the right customer interview questions. Ask them what they have bought the last time when they went shopping. Ask them how they’ve chosen the foods they bought. If they are really concerned about anything related to malnutrition, they will probably say something like, ‘I read the ingredients to check if they contain additives or high sugar.’ And then you move on by asking related questions to dig deeply. What is the real problem they have?
Here, the entry segment (also called beachhead market) is extremely important. You can’t risk targeting a group of people where the problem is just a nuisance rather than a serious issue to tackle. Why? Because you have to start selling right away. And the first customers are usually the people who really feel the pain. If you can’t sell enough and frequently while you have costs, you may fail very quickly. Also customers that feel a real issue often come back again to buy your product for the second time, third time etc. If people don’t care about the problem that much, they might not come back again in the mid to long run (check retention rate!).
If you can’t find a painful problem and can’t understand who your primary customers are, you might end up in the same office that you have left a couple of years ago, like most of the entrepreneurs do.
2 - Iterate, iterate, and iterate
Don’t think that your idea is the best idea in the world.
Bill Aulet, famous professor of entrepreneurship at MIT, attended a podcast and said that fewer than 6% of the patents developed are commercialized, in other words, reached the market (Harvard Business Review, 2024). Now, let’s assume that you are just as smart as MIT students, researchers or whatsoever. Don’t trust your idea!
Nobody cares about your idea as much as you do. In fact, people are not keen to buy your product. People are trying to solve their own problems or address their own needs. That’s it. So, all you have to do is to find a business idea that would help some people out there, waiting their problem to be solved. To do this, you have to iterate. In other words, test your idea among your customers and be ready to change it!
You don’t have to be super innovative. You just have to find the best solution which works absolutely fine. Don’t worry. Your customers tell you if it works or not. If they keep buying, it means it works.
3 - Build a strong team
This is the issue I still have.
We have to have a rock solid team with diversified talents and knowledge in order to get going. You can’t handle everything on your own. There is a reason why VCs check how strong and well-balanced your team is.
Also, you have to come up with different and distinct ideas to pick the best solution that works. How many different ideas can you bring to the table on your own? All of us has different perspectives. Brainstorming is better when done by multiple people. On the other hand, the team can split to conduct much more customer interviews to understand problems better.
In a nutshell, there are obvious advantages of having a great team.
References:
Harvard Business Review. (2024). A Roadmap for Today’s Entrepreneurs. [online] Available at: https://hbr.org/podcast/2024/04/a-roadmap-for-todays-entrepreneurs.