Entrepreneurship: 60 Day Startup Launch Blueprint

As an entrepreneur, one of the most important tasks you can perform is getting your idea(s) out from your head into a tangible format so that you can communicate that with others. In the past, this usually meant a well-researched business plan, that would usually take weeks (more like months) to create.

I turn to the Lean Canvas to help me quickly formulate possible business models, product launches, campaigns and variations of, and communicate this with my stakeholders for my Lead Flow Method work. Having the Lean Canvas as a visual guide made this part “communicating the model/idea” so much more effective — and I think the most valuable function of the tool.

The problem with business plans for startups & entrepreneurs are that they’re a waste of time, don’t get me wrong a well-researched business plan is important but only at the right stage of your business (usually when you’re in growth/investment).

This quote from Steve Blank sums up this point in case: “Business Plan: a document investors make you write, that they don’t read”.

The key fundamental to Lean methodology is the elimination of waste — this includes time, processes, inventory and more.

So as a lean startup you need a quicker way to get ideas out of your head, you need to stay lean & avoid waste — so, it’s time to introduce Lean Canvas.

Before we jump into the Lean Canvas it’s important to point out that Lean Canvas has been adapted by Ash Maurya from the very popular Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder — check out this video for more information (40+ mins).

Lean Canvas uses the same 9 blocks concept except they’ve been modified slightly to suit the needs/ purposes/requirements of a Lean Startup. The Lean Canvas is the perfect one-page format for brainstorming possible business models, the blocks guide you through logical steps starting with your customer problems right through to your unfair advantage (often the hardest block to answer).

(Disclaimer: The "Business Model Canvas" tool used in some parts of this course is used under Creative Commons license and attribution goes to Strategyzer. This course has no affiliation with and is not endorsed by the authors of the Business Model Canvas.)

Getting More for Less: The Role of Resourcefulness in Entrepreneurship?

Resourcefulness is a central concept of entrepreneurship and is frequently invoked to explain how entrepreneurial actors “find a way” to innovate, create, and turn ideas into reality. Indeed, resourcefulness is so central to entrepreneurship that it has in many ways become a ubiquitous concept that is generally assumed. Unfortunately, the perceived ubiquity of resourcefulness in entrepreneurship has stunted scholarly inquiry into the what resourcefulness is; who resourceful actors are; why and when actors are resourceful and with what consequence; and how actors are resourceful.

What is an Entrepreneurial Mindset? An entrepreneurial mindset is a set of skills that enable people to identify and make the most of opportunities, overcome and learn from setbacks, and succeed in a variety of settings.

How we view ourselves and the world around us impacts our ability to dream and achieve. In today’s innovation economy, where needs and opportunities are evolving faster and more fluidly than ever before, our youth need a mindset that equips them to recognize opportunity, take initiative, and innovate in the face of challenges. NFTE has developed a framework for describing this quintessentially entrepreneurial mindset, drawing on our depth of experience teaching entrepreneurship to young people.

Is Your Business Taking Over Your Life? It started with the dream of making great money, doing what you love and having lots of time to enjoy it all. But in reality you are buried in a pile of too much work, too little time, not enough help and no light at the end of the tunnel. This is NOT what you signed up for when you decided to become an entrepreneur. It is time to run your business so it does not run you!

Not pivoting away or quickly enough from a bad product, a bad hire, or a bad decision was cited as a reason for failure in 7% of the post mortems. Dwelling or being married to a bad idea can sap resources and money as well as leave employees frustrated by a lack of progress.

Imercive is one those tech startups that went under due to a failure to pivot. The company, which shut down in 2009, originally intended to let people order from local restaurants via instant messages.

After that concept proved too difficult and expensive to be functional, founder Keith Nowak decided to think bigger. Instant messaging could be used to help people interact with all kinds of businesses, not just restaurants — and in turn, it would help those businesses interact better with their customers.

But by the time Nowak recognized this new, bigger opportunity, Imercive had already spent most of the money from its seed round. Without any results to show for it, nor any proof that the new vision could gain traction, the company had to close down.

As Keith Nowak writes in Imercive’s post-mortem:

“We were caught mid-pivot – half way between a strategy we knew wouldn’t work and one which we believed could be successful but was not able to be aggressively pursued. This was a very difficult place to be both professionally and personally. We were extremely frustrated at not being able to properly go after our new strategy and every day that passed without meaningful progress was one step closer to the failure of my first company. Even though we put everything we had into getting through this phase we were never able to make it through the pivot.”

However, some say pivoting isn’t always the answer. Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson wrote in a 2018 blog post that the concept of pivoting out of a bad startup idea is overrated, and that often it’s better to just let a bad idea fail:

“There is nothing I dislike more than carrying on with something when I’ve lost interest, and worse, the founders have lost interest. So my view is if you’ve failed, accept it, announce it, and deal with it. Shut the business down, give back the cash, and rip up the cap table. Then do whatever you want to do next. If it is another startup, do it from scratch and keep as much of it as you can. If it is something else, well then do that too.”

Work-life balance is not something that startup founders often get, so the risk of burning out is high. Burnout was given as a reason for failure 8% of the time. The ability to cut your losses where necessary and redirect your efforts when you see a dead end was deemed important to succeeding and avoiding burnout, as was having a solid, diverse, and driven team so that responsibilities can be shared.

What can make conversations about burnout difficult, especially in Silicon Valley, is the widespread belief that building a successful company will always involve some degree of possibly hazardous overwork. As Uber board member and CEO of Thrive Global Arianna Huffington puts it:

“The prevalent view of startup founders in Silicon Valley is a delusion that in order to succeed, in order to build a high-growth company, you need to burn out.”

At the same time, various founders have spoken up about how damaging burnout can be. Former Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad has said,

“I think people are unprepared for how hard and awful it is going to be to start a company. I certainly was.”

There are many good ideas out there in the world, but 9% of startup post-mortem founders found that a lack of passion for a domain and a lack of knowledge of a domain were key reasons for failure no matter how good an idea is.

In NewsTilt’s post-mortem, the team candidly spoke about their lack of interest in the domain they selected:

“I think it’s fair to say we didn’t really care about journalism. We started by building a commenting product which came from my desire for the perfect commenting system for my blog. This turned into designing the best damn commenting system ever, which led to figuring out an ideal customer: newspapers…

“But we didn’t really care about journalism, and weren’t even avid news readers. If the first thing we did every day was go to news.bbc.co.uk, we should have been making this product. But even when we had NewsTilt, it wasn’t my go-to place to be entertained, that was still Hacker News and Reddit. And how could we build a product that we were only interested in from a business perspective.”

Doughbies, which raised $670,000 for an on-demand cookie delivery service in 2013, also failed because of a lack of interest from its founders and team. The company appeared to be doing well, with 36% gross margins and 12% net profit at the time it shut down. The problem, as CEO Daniel Conway put it, was that there wasn’t massive growth or enough interest in running the business:

“Ultimately we shut down because our team is ready to move on to something new.”

Ignoring users is a tried and true way to fail. Tunnel vision and not gathering user feedback are fatal flaws for most tech startups.

For instance, eCrowds, a web content management system company, said,

“We spent way too much time building [our product] for ourselves and not getting feedback from prospects — it’s easy to get tunnel vision. I’d recommend not going more than two or three months from the initial start to getting in the hands of prospects that are truly objective.”

Similarly, VoterTide wrote,

“We didn’t spend enough time talking with customers and were rolling out features that I thought were great, but we didn’t gather enough input from clients. We didn’t realize it until it was too late. It’s easy to get tricked into thinking your thing is cool. You have to pay attention to your customers and adapt to their needs.”

Despite the platitudes that startups shouldn’t pay attention to the competition, the reality is that once an idea gets hot or gets market validation, there may be many entrants in a space. And while obsessing over the competition is not healthy, ignoring them was also a recipe for failure in 19% of the startup failures.

Mark Hedland of Wesabe talked about this in his post-mortem stating:

“Between the worse data aggregation method and the much higher amount of work Wesabe made you do, it was far easier to have a good experience on Mint, and that good experience came far more quickly. Everything I’ve mentioned — not being dependent on a single source provider, preserving users’ privacy, helping users actually make positive change in their financial lives — all of those things are great, rational reasons to pursue what we pursued. But none of them matter if the product is harder to use.”

Children’s apparel delivery service Mac & Mia found itself in a tough spot competing with highly successful companies like Stitch Fix and shut down only a year after its 2018 launch:

“Mac & Mia faced a host of competitors in the children’s delivery box space, including the aforementioned Stitch Fix, which launched its kids clothing service in 2018. Stitch Fix went public in 2017 and has a market cap around $2.7 billion. At least 20 other upstarts have launched similar delivery services for children’s clothes.”

Tackling problems that are interesting to solve rather than those that serve a market need was cited as the No. 1 reason for failure, noted in 42% of cases.

As Patient Communicator wrote,

“I realized, essentially, that we had no customers because no one was really interested in the model we were pitching. Doctors want more patients, not an efficient office.”

Treehouse Logic applied the concept more broadly in their post-mortem, writing,

“Startups fail when they are not solving a market problem. We were not solving a large enough problem that we could universally serve with a scalable solution. We had great technology, great data on shopping behavior, great reputation as a though leader, great expertise, great advisors, etc, but what we didn’t have was technology or business model that solved a pain point in a scalable way.”

Kolos was direct about its biggest mistake:

“With Kolos, we did a lot of things right, but it was useless because we ignored the single most important aspect every startup should focus on first: the right product.”

A month after Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Robert Morris started the Y Combinator seed accelerator in 2005, they picked “make something people want” as their motto.

Our study shows that failing to do this is one of the easiest ways to guarantee startup failure.