The Secret to Entrepreneurship

Ever come across a product or service that you had the idea for months or maybe even years ago? Perhaps that frustrated you because another entrepreneur launched a startup based on your idea and is now earning a profit on it! Maybe you feel like you missed your opportunity to dive into entrepreneurship and create something special.

This is often the painful story of an aspiring entrepreneur or entrepreneur-in-the-making who missed out an that awesome opportunity to make it big! A new entrepreneur can easily spend months or even years talking about their idea or passion project without taking any real action to turn it into a viable business venture.

I’ve been in the same spot and understand how easy it is to fall into this trap. After all, if we start looking into the topic of entrepreneurship or creating a new business, we can easily drown in a sea of information on venture capital, innovation, success, private equity, entrepreneurial mindset, silicon valley, entrepreneurial opportunities, finding an investor, founder challenges, entrepreneurial spirit, and so many more related topics. Before you know it, you’ve read more articles than you can count on the topic of entrepreneurship and you haven’t taken any steps towards becoming a successful entrepreneur.

The problem for any aspiring entrepreneur or entrepreneur-in-the-making is that ideas are cheap. If I gave you a prompt and asked you to brainstorm 10 business ideas for that challenge prompt, you could easily come up with at least 10, if not more. What separates us from the successful entrepreneur who is now profiting off of your business idea or passion project is execution. That is, they successfully took that idea from concept to creation and then started a new venture.

What I Learned Teaching Entrepreneurship

I have spent years, facilitating startup and entrepreneurship events like Techstars Startup Weekend and teaching audiences the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, innovation, and startup creation so that aspiring entrepreneurs can take their innovative ideas and launch a venture. I teach the same strategies to students in entrepreneurship courses or programs at the University of Pennsylvania and Sarah Lawrence College. With a surge in interest in becoming an entrepreneur or learning about entrepreneurship, these events and programs have been in high demand.

To become an entrepreneur, it is important that we successfully get that business idea out of our heads and onto paper so that we can begin to develop it into what could eventually become a venture.

4 Steps to Launch an Opportunity or Idea from Concept to Venture

Step back and get clarity on who you intend to serve

For any new idea to become a viable new business or venture, it must first address a real problem faced by a specific group of people. Without a real problem to solve, even a great entrepreneur will not succeed. In order to prepare your venture for the next step, it is critical that you determine:

• who your dream customer is
• what your dream customer’s problem is
• what problems or obstacles your dream customer is facing
• how that problem is currently measured

5 Entrepreneurship Questions to Drive Your Analysis

For additional and deeper questions, read the article, 27 Questions to Help You Identify Your Customer’s Problem.

• What is the problem as you, the entrepreneur, currently know it? Describe a specific situation (include the people and stakeholders involved and their role/experience)
• What job or task was the person suffering the problem attempting to accomplish, when the problem happened?  Learn more about Jobs to be Done Theory.
• How did the person know the problem was happening or happened? Or did the person not even know?  (this opens an interesting possibility)
• How is the success of the attempted job or task measured?
• What does the problem cost to any or all of the stakeholders involved in the problem?

Validate Your Findings

All of the work you did in the first step helped you establish a collection of hypotheses related to the problem, however, this must be verified through first hand investigation and data collection by the entrepreneur.  While you may be absolutely certain that your problem statement is correct, it is almost a certainty that you are not 100% accurate.  Validation of your problem, through surveys, observations, experiments, and interviews, will help you refine the problem ahead of beginning the design of a solution.  Your problem may be made up of 10, 15, or 20 hypotheses; set up surveys, observations, experiments, or interviews, accordingly to confirm each one.  Once you have all of the results, update and finalize your problem statement.  Consider the following questions in your effort to validate the problem.

• Are the problem stakeholders you identified actually connected to the problem? If not, did you have too many or not enough?
• Would the person suffering from the problem consider the problem “painful” enough to warrant a solution? Is the job or task they are attempting important enough?
• What evidence do you have to support the estimates for the problem or opportunity cost?
• If the problem is one that no one is aware of, how can you verify it is worth solving?

Solution (re)Design

Let’s be honest, you already had the solution in your mind before you began investigating the problem thoroughly.  Thus, with a validated problem in hand, you will need to design or re-design the solution to address the specific elements of problem.  For this step, design a solution that does no more and no less than what the problem calls for.  Product-Market fit is critical to resonating with potential customers/users.  Build too much solution and your customer sees it as too complicated.  Build too little solution and your customer is left having to find the remainder of the solution elsewhere.  Consider the following questions in your solution (re)design.

• How does your solution allow the user to complete the intended job or task?
• Which features of your solution address which features of the problem? Are there extra features?  Or not enough?
• How much does the solution cost in relation to the cost of the problem?
• In what measurable ways does the solution improve/solve the problem? (refer to problem metrics)
• In what measurable ways does the solution complicate the job or task of the user?
• Conduct a cost/benefit analysis of the complications versus improvements.

Design a Sustainability Model

Solutions that are meant to solve problems for people other than yourself must have a way of surviving on their own.  That is, they must have a model for sustaining themselves in the market.  This is absolutely critical if you plan to scale your solution to reach ever increasing users.  Consider the following elements when designing your own sustainability model.

• Target customer segments (distinguish between user and customer, if applicable)
• Value proposition for each customer/user segment, what are they?
• Pricing strategies and models, what are they?
• Fixed and variable cost elements, what are they? (focus on the big ones first)
• Distribution channels and methods, how will you get this into the hands of the customer?
• Competition, who are they, how do they compete with your solution?
• Customer acquisition, how will you find and secure customers?

That said, nothing wrong with reading up and learning about venture capital, innovation, success, private equity, entrepreneurial mindset, silicon valley, entrepreneurial opportunities, finding an investor, founder challenges, entrepreneurial spirit, and more. Just make sure you take action sooner rather than later and get going on launching that venture!