Dear startup founders, do the shit that matters

It happens to the best of us.

We get all passionate about our idea, all fired up and we charge in blindly, so carelessly, that we end up jumping off the deep end… forgetting about our priorities.

In one of my earlier ventures when I was much younger, I once spent 5-6 hours a day for 5 consecutive days “thinking” and designing my company logo. It was an absolutely poor use of my time and money. Well done, Joel. Job well done =(

As you can imagine, that venture crashed.

As an entrepreneur, you pay the price of your decisions.

When you’re an employee, your priorities are clear. After all, you don’t really get to set them. Your boss “dictates” them, and if he makes poor choices, you don’t bear the cost or full responsibility. He does.

But as an entrepreneur, things are different. You get to make your own choices. You get to set your own priorities. And unfortunately, when you make poor choices, there’s no one to bail you out. You pay the price.

Fast forward to today, I’ve grown and learned a lot from my earlier ventures. We now have apps in the App Store that get over 750,000 downloads in a month.

Below is a simple framework of how we got our shit together, so that we work on things that make a difference to the business.

If you’ve an idea but no product, your priorities will be:

• Put a website together that explains your product. Can you get your target user to give you their name and information in exchange for details? Or even better, put a “Buy Now” button and see if you can get sales. No actual product? That’s fine. Simply refund the money with a letter of apology explaining it’s a market test.
• Create an interactive mockup of your app idea. Use tools such as proto.io to create interactive mockups, so users can experience something closer to the actual product.
• Put your mockup in front of as many of your target users as possible to get real user feedback. Then tweak accordingly.

If users love your idea, but you’ve no resources (expertise or money) to create your product, your priorities will be:

• Group like-minded friends/colleagues together. Pool your expertise and/or money together to either create a working prototype, or outsource its development to an expert.
• Otherwise, pick up the necessary skills to put the product together. Work after 6pm to get your product up.
• Or get funding. Put together a pitch deck and pitch. Put together a Kickstarter campaign. Raise money from friends and relatives.
• Or even better, get pre-sales. Hustle for the sale. There’s nothing more assuring than getting sales before the product is even completed.

If you have a prototype of your product, your priorities will be:

• Get the product ready enough to sell it, but don’t worry about perfecting it. Good is good enough. It doesn’t have to be 100 percent perfect.
• Sell it. Sell at a discount. Get sales. So you can raise funding or have enough for you to sustain yourself, reinvest and grow at your own pace.
• Then make it better. Add more features. Turn it into a product that you can sell at a premium price.

It’s easy to do the trivial stuff first