There’s no shortage of advice to be had in the business world, from Sun Tzu’s Art of War (what is it with CEOs who insist on that book?) to Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul (I made that one up to be funny, but it turns out to be real!). There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of books out there telling you how to run a business. It’s hard to know where to begin, but I plunged in because I could stand to learn a few things about business practices. Lately I’ve been reading The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. It’s exactly what the title suggests, a guide to building a product and a company and it’s a really terrific book, full of practical advice.
The first important bit of advice I got from The Startup Owner’s Manual was,
“There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside”.
I realized that this is completely necessary advice for me – I’ve been spending a lot of time researching online and in books, reading about how to manage a business, learning app user interface design, programming, you name it, I’ve been working on it in the privacy of my office space. However, I have yet to meet a single potential user of my app and have come to realize that this is a major problem. How am I going to sell my app to anyone if I don’t know who they are and what they want? How will I figure out what app features they want or don’t want? I clearly don’t know enough about my potential customers, so I have to get out and do some legwork, meeting users and talking to people.
The advice to “get outside the building” came almost concurrently with another bit I’ve been mulling over recently, which is,
“Get Outside Your Comfort Zone”,
from a podcast of Drew Houston of Dropbox in the Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series (iTunes U). For me the two bits of advice are related, since I find getting out and interacting with potential customers to be a challenge. I’m an introvert with a Ph.D., so I’m really good at researching and learning, working with ideas and objects. Working with people, on the other hand, is more of a challenge for me. As a result, meeting with potential customers will be a stretch as it involves getting out of the office and interacting with near-strangers. However, I realized that I have been making some assumptions about potential users that desperately need to be tested. The only way to do that is to meet with people, the kind of people who are likely to use my app. Without testing my assumptions, I will be flying blind and developing my app based on guesswork rather than information, which could lead to producing an app that nobody wants. That, it goes without saying, would be bad. OK people, here I come!