Inside the Office
A team of founders came to see me this week with an idea. They always have an idea…
The idea shows up first, like a puppy, and nobody has asked yet who’s going to walk it.
Since it belongs to them, I’m not going to tell you what the idea was. After all, it might be good. However, what they didn’t have was a problem. They had the outline of one… as-in the kind of thing you can say in a sentence while everyone in the room nods. So we spent the next hour taking that idea apart.
Who exactly has this problem? What does that person do about it today? What does this problem cost them in money or time or embarrassment? When did they last encounter the problem and what did they do the next morning?
Each questions turned up an assumption they didn’t know they were making. Ultimately, they left with more questions than they walked in with, which is what I count as a good meeting. And the whole time, I was thinking about stairs.
Why stairs? Well, there’s an essay by John Salvatier called Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail. He spent his teenage years doing construction on his father’s rental properties, and he opens with a set of basement stairs. Building the stairs seems easy enough. It requires two long boards, some steps, some brackets, and probably an afternoon of work. Or so he thought.
Then he starts building and discovers how wrong he was. The angle cut can’t be traced the obvious way. The lumber is warped (because lumber is always warped). The screws pull the brackets crooked. Any screws that are too long come up through the step and into your foot. He even captions the photo in the article “Those goddamn stairs.”
His point, of course, is much bigger than carpentry. Turns out, everything is like these stairs once you get close enough to it. More importantly, the details hide. Before you learn one of those details, you can’t see it. After you learn it, you can’t remember not knowing it. That’s how smart people get stuck, and it’s how they end up arguing for three hours about a board, which he and his father did.
A startup idea is the stairs before anyone has bought lumber.
I know this because I ran a party supply company for thirty years. From the outside, people assumed it was… well… a party. But it wasn’t. It was mostly boxes, creating new products, organizing the manufacturing/supply chain, and everything else I had to learn by operating the business every day. And I learned those things by attending more Proms, weddings and corporate events than anyone should have to attend.
So I told the founders in my office to do the same thing. Go stand next to your problem. Watch one customer live through the problem from start to finish. Then do the job yourself for a day and write down everything that surprised you, because the surprises are the business.
By the way, Salvatier’s essay is free on his blog at johnsalvatier.org. Search the title and it comes right up. It’ll take you ten minutes, so be sure to go read it before you write the plan… or the strategy… or buy the lumber.
-Shep
Worth Your Time
If feels like every other week I find myself talking with a founder going at it alone. When I ask, “Why don’t you have a co-founder?” the answer I get is always the same: I’ve tried, but I can’t find one.
To which I usually respond: “Try harder.”
OK… I’m maybe not that blunt, but that’s the basic gist of my response. And it’s for two important reasons.
Reason #1) Building companies is simply too hard to do by yourself. You need someone going to battle with you, or you’re going to burn out.
Reason #2) If you can’t even convince one other person to get excited enough about your startup to build it with you, how are you going to convince anyone else your startup is worth their time/money/resources/interest?
Anyway… since I’m sure someone out there is searching for a co-founders (or, even worse, stubbornly going at it alone), here’s an article about co-founder dating that’s definitely worth your time.
