Building a company from scratch is exhausting.
Entrepreneurs need various kinds of support to stay afloat —understanding friends and family, tough advisers / mentors, a good reading list to encourage contemplation, these are all important.
But the best source of support is the people actually using what you build. Their stories are the ones that open up your world when you’re thinking too narrowly, and provide inspiration to keep going. While solving a problem for one person typically doesn’t justify a stable small business or a rapidly growing startup, it’s the starting point for everything else.
Read MoreI’ve never seen a business plan that looked like a business.
I’m not sure exactly why this is, but it probably has something to do with the fact that in the early stage of any company there are a lot of variables, and things that seem to mean one thing can easily turn out to mean something else entirely. Sort of a particle / wave duality principle, but for startups.
(A high number of people who sign up for a product trial, for example, might not be a positive sign if none of them stick around once their two weeks is up — possibly indicating that your inbound growth levers need tweaking).
For many entrepreneurs and startups, frameworks occupy a critical space — the one that arrives after “I have a bunch of ideas” but before “here’s the full plan to take over the world.”
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