The 3 hard lessons from a decade of business consulting and bootstrapping start-ups
In the past decade, I have seen some spectacular business successes and failures some made by me and others from the businesses I consulted for. These are the 3 most common obstacles that I saw the most, causing people to fail where they did not have to. 1. Not respecting the volume required Regardless of your manner of getting attention, getting results, or at least proper feedback, requires enormous volume. This can dishearten or excite you, your choice, but it still does not change the fact that if you want to be competitive, never mind market-leading, you will need to reach outreach volumes that are way beyond what you are currently doing. It's math, for example with ads. To get 100 paying members at a 5% conversion rate you would need 2000 leads, to get that with ads at a $10 cost per lead, it will cost you $20 000. Or just a megaton of time if you do cold outreach or organic. Are you willing to do it? 2. Success lies within the micro-adjustments, not the big pivots Business pivots are sexy, micro adjustments are not. When you build a business it's essential to have an idea, test it, and improve based on the feedback. Some people just have a business sense or crazy amounts of capital but for the rest of us, we have to do the repetitions. Do what you think is going to work best, test it with the market and make micro adjustments[copy, model, scripts] 3. Getting emotional instead of tactical When we fail, we don’t suck, our product does. People simply don’t see your offer as a fair trade. It could be your offer, the market you are addressing or just simply bad timing. Start breaking your business down into it's components and focus on the metrics. Then attack those with all your might instead of getting disheartened by the “I suck at business” fallacy. It took me 10 years to learn the above lessons so hopefully, it could save you some time.