Doing is better than thinking
Photo credit: dlr_de (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Some entrepreneurs wait and wait for their “best idea” before starting. They have many ideas that they never execute because they have a fear that they will be beaten by competitors. They have a fear of failure and this is the main reason some people never even start on the ‘entrepreneur’ path. They fail to break startup inertia.
Stories like Google and Facebook give false hope. It may sound like every successful entrepreneur got their first venture right and became super successful and that’s part of the reason why people want to find the “perfect” idea before investing their time on it. But this is the exception rather than the rule.
Instead I prefer stories which fit into the real world more, such as Angry Birds or Draw Something. If you don’t know their stories, Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game, and OMGPOP spent 6 years to develop 35 games before releasing Draw Something on iOS and sold it for USD$180M.
Why is this more realistic? People need learning to build their experience and experience is more likely to lead to success.
Isn’t learning from other entrepreneur’s experience quicker? No, you can only obtain a tiny chunk of experience from other entrepreneurs in their sharing. The only way to learn every aspects of entrepreneurship is by doing. When you know what you lack, then you can ask the right questions to speed up your learning process.
Often the initial idea is crappy. You have to get your hands dirty before finding the right path for your product. For instance, our team wouldn’t have developed the Darkroom app as a Christmas project (which pivoted to the idea of the photo app network called Steply that attracts 9M+ downloads) if we didn’t develop a few unsuccessful productivity apps for iPhone. Without our experience in Steply, we wouldn’t be working on Chaopin, a fashion photo app, that attracts million of photo views every month. Once you get started, moving in momentum is much easier than the initial launch.
Don’t just think. Start by doing.
