Startup Myths to Ignore!

There are a number of myths that bootstrap founders need to ignore when they start. The first two are:

1) you need a big idea to get going

2) you must identify product market fit

When you bootstrap you absolutely don’t need a big idea to get going.  Big ideas are fixed and are generally thought up in a lightbulb moment without talking in great detail to your prospective customers. They do very occasionally work ( Groupon) but, more often than not, a big idea that a founder has leads to the classic ‘solution looking for a problem’ and you end up going to the wall and failing.

When you’re bootstrapping you must, of course, have an idea of the space that you want to play in, but it’s important to be fluid and flexible. You need to poke around in corners. Discover and develop along the way. A big idea can make you rigid and take you down the wrong road.

One of the biggest misconceptions (caused by the enormous amount of investor advice that floats around social media) is the myth of focusing on product market fit. When you start bootstrapping you need to ignore the product market fit. The focus has to be on getting cash through the door and putting food on the table. You have to get an MVP ( Minimum Viable Product) out the door and in front of clients. Bootstrapping helps by forcing you to do this, as you have to eat!

When you first get your MVP out there it should be basic, and I mean really basic. It will not be the product you use to build and scale your business. At the start you just need to get something out that allows you to start talking to customers and importantly charging them to get some cash in. This is why at the start you should be building small almost customized one-off products.  This allows you to start talking to customers and more importantly, listening to them. You need to listen really hard to understand what their real pain points are. Then you can start to iterate with the small products you have built, to improve and adapt the product, to really solve a pain point and provide a solution based on actual customer feedback. By building a product that solves a pain point, based on actual customer feedback, you are ensuring that you don’t end up with a solution looking for a problem.

This also highlights why early on it’s best to work with smaller players. Bigger players have layers upon layers of people and processes and more likely than not, the buyer and the end user are different people. At the smaller players the buyer and end user are the same person. Smaller players are also under resourced, in more pain and a solution will have a greater impact on their business. By talking directly to the end user at the smaller players, you can start to understand how to adapt the product to start to really fix their problem. The more one-off products that you build, the more customers that you build for and the more time you spend talking directly with them, the quicker you will find the common problem.

The common problem is the first step you have towards building a product that solves a problem for multiple clients. As you start to build and refine, you are starting to build the product that will enable you to grow and scale.

By ignoring product market fit in the early days, you have carefully worked to achieve and build product market fit directly with your customers.  The difference is that you’ve done it while funding yourself, and retaining ownership. By having deep discussions with small customers about their pain points as you build it, you have ensured that you’ve got it right. This, in turn, creates a sustainable ‘must-have’ product to build on.

It's important to note that this is not a quick process! It can take anything from 12 to 24 to 36 months as you produce products, listen to feedback, iterate, adapt, rebuild and listen again. But this time scale is the same as that which angels, incubators, seed funding and VC’s assume it will take with the startups they invest in. The difference is your process is more rigorous, you’re earning while you do it and at the end of the day - you own it!  It’s your superpower 😊 

So, start small. Build small, one-off, customized products for small players. Talk to them and listen. Hard. Get money through the door so you can put food on the table. Continually adapt the product to solve real pain points. As you solve the pain points and continuously adapt the product - look for the commonality. When you spot that, start to build a product that meets the need and solves the pain points of multiple small clients.  This allows you to build the product you can use to grow and scale.

But how do you even get started - check out next week’s blog – Lie, Cheat and Steal How to start to learn more! Register at www.bootstrapconfidential.com 

#startups #founders #bootstrappers