Entrepreneurs live everyday with the fear that whatever they are putting their heart and soul into will fail completely. Will you have ruined your career? Will you bankrupt your family? What about your reputation? A scenario like this can seem unrecoverable when viewed in the abstract.
Disempower Your Fears by Vividly Imagining Your Worst-Case Failure, and the Process You Will Go Through to Recover from It
Write it out. Create a vivid picture of everything you will lose, and everything you will do to rebuild again.
One of the biggest sources of anxiety related to this doomsday scenario is fear of the unknown. When you play out the scenario in detail you will see that failure is not as bad as you imagine it, and that everything is recoverable.
Many of the most successful entrepreneurs and creatives have crashed-and-burned, sometimes multiple times, only to recover and come back stronger than ever.
– The Startup Daily
The first step in the Lean Startup approach is to determine your Minimum Viable product (MVP)—the minimum set of features that your customers will pay for.
However, this does mean you need to actually develop those features. Before committing any resources to development, you should make sure people will use the features that you plan to build.
Validate Your Market with a Concierge MVP
Simulate having a finished product by having your people manually deliver the solution to early customers. Members of the founding team can manually purchase and ship products, process payments, generate emails, and any other tasks that will eventually be automated.
Commit resources to automating the solution only when the workload becomes too great and you have successfully proven your assumptions.
– The Startup Daily
If you accept work that is outside your area of expertise the quality of your work won’t be as good as it could be, and you will set a precedent that is hard to break.
Prove to the world you are serious about what you specialize in and leave generalization to the competition.
Don’t Be Afraid to Turn Down Work that is Outside Your Area of Specialization
You might have a slower start, but when you stick to the work you are most passionate about you will build a stronger, more valuable business in the long-term
– The Startup Daily
Getting an accurate estimate of how long a project will take can be an exercise in frustration. The problem is that people are hardwired to be overly optimistic about their own abilities.
Most People Underestimate How Long it Will Take Them to Complete a Project
Yet people are fairly accurate at predicting how long it will take someone else to complete that same task.
To get an accurate estimate, ask how long they think it will take someone else to complete the task before assigning it.
– The Startup Daily
You are doing yourself a disservice when you wait for the perfect idea, the perfect time to start, or for your work to be perfect before releasing it to world.
Perfection is unattainable. When you strive for perfection and don’t find it, you’re giving yourself an excuse to do nothing at all.
Instead of Trying to Do Perfect Work, Just Strive to Do Your Best
In most cases you would have found that perfect idea to be flawed anyway. Begin with something that is just good enough, and keep improving on it until you know you have done your best.
– The Startup Daily
Many great ideas first arrive before their time, only to fail and be forgotten. Some ideas fail and are reborn repeatedly before the world is ready to embrace them.
Yesterday’s Failure May be Tomorrow’s Blockbuster
Political, social, and technological changes ensure that yesterday’s markets are not the same as today’s.
Just because an idea failed in the past, doesn’t mean it should be discounted today, or in the future.
– The Startup Daily
As you work your way through your project milestones, you will generate a trail of checklists, old drafts, and other relics of your completed work. Don’t throw away this evidence of your progress.
Create a “Done Wall” to Celebrate Completed Tasks
Gather and proudly display these artifacts as a monument to your achievements. You will be more motivated to continue working when you are surrounded by a record of how far you have come.
– The Startup Daily
If your meetings are running too long, there is a simple change you can make that will encourage people to keep things brief.
Try Holding Stand-up Meetings
By making standing mandatory, it becomes clear to everyone that the meeting is meant to be short. When someone does get long-winded, the restlessness in the group’s body language is more apparent, which encourages people to speak their mind and then yield to the next person.
– The Startup Daily
It’s the customer, not your best product, that is the center of your brand’s story. Every aspect of your business that touches your customer impacts your brand’s image.
Your Brand Is the Sum of Your Best and Your Worst
Your finest product affects the perception of your brand, but so does your most embarrassing flop. Your star employees on their best days contribute, and so do the biggest mistakes of your worst hire. If you have one available, even the state of your restroom at its best and worst will contribute.
The more goodwill you can build for your brand through a pattern of positive impressions, the more forgiving your customers will be of your missteps.
– The Startup Daily
Experts in a given field can develop a strong intuitive sense that allows them to quickly make the right decisions, often without knowing why they made them. But the success of these instinctive decisions makes these experts susceptible to overconfidently trusting their intuition in situations where a careful analysis would be more appropriate.
An Expert’s Level of Confidence is a Poor Indicator of Accuracy
If the environment is not sufficiently stable, such as when predicting financial markets or the success of startups, or if the expert has not had sufficient time to train their intuition in that type of situation, then a logical analysis will give a better decision than trusting an expert’s gut instincts.
– The Startup Daily
