A Start-up Journey (Persevere or Pivot?)

This is the 19th post in the Start-up Journey series, click here to read the first one.

A decision has to be made. A decision that most entrepreneurs will have to make, often many times in their careers. Whether to continue down a path… or not. It seems like a simple decision, A or B, but it is not.

Entrepreneurs are simultaneously the smartest, and dumbest people I know. Smart, because we actually come up with new ideas and at least attempt to execute on them. This separates us from the rest of the people on the planet. Dumb. because we too often get caught up in our ideas and try to keep them alive when they should be killed off. I personally know many entrepreneurs who have wasted years of their lives on ideas that simply can’t get off the ground. Ideas that are too radical, too early, too late, underfunded, or just plain dumb. I have had several ideas over the years that fall into each of these categories.

One of the nice things about being an entrepreneur in the internet space is that we never actually have to “Kill off” an idea. The internet superhighway is littered with abandoned carcasses of ideas. We could just delete the files and domains, but why? “Maybe I will get back to that later”. I have at least 15 live domains with dead ideas floating around out there. What good are they? I dunno, but it only costs me $9/yr to keep all of that past effort alive. For each one I have invested months of time, energy and brain cells… it is too painful to just delete them. I can usually see, in hindsight, exactly what caused each one to fail. Why I could not see it in advance, is another entrepreneur’s dilemma. While each of them is a “learning” opportunity, you sometimes wonder how may lessons there are in this damn course.

So I have decided not to pursue the Automated Webinar idea further. That does not mean it goes away… it just goes to the side as I focus on the next thing. It will remain out there in my peripheral vision for a while. So what was learned from this one? The main thing is speed. I think this applies to anyone in this space, speed kills, or rather, lack of speed. One of the wonderful things about internet ideas is that just about anyone can jump in, of course that means that a lot of people are in the sandbox. Many ideas have failed either because someone else came up with the same one, or stole yours, and was able to execute it better, and/or faster than you could. Frankly, that is what I was doing. As you may recall, I did not come up with this idea, I just thought I could do it better, and I did. But then someone came along behind me and did it even better, and got it to market faster. It is all very Darwinian.

I have executed a lot of ideas. I have had a few singles, maybe even a few doubles, but not a home run yet. But a lot of strike outs. Yet I keep stepping back up to the plate, and I keep swinging. It’s what entrepreneurs do. I heard Eric Ries on This Week in Startups recently talking about this dilemma, and he said a lot of things that made a lot of sense. I ordered his book, The Lean Startup, if you are in this space, you might want to check it out also.

So what am I doing now? Well, I’m so glad you asked. I have four new things I am working on, and three ideas that are rattling around in the back of my head. If you enjoyed this series, let me know… maybe I will do it again.