Top business mistakes
Wanna save yourself time, energy and effort?
Well, maybe you could read the common mistakes being made.
Even if you read them, some of you will still not believe what is written. You will go try your own methods and experience them by yourself. I did not believe all the recommendations i received from my mentors at the Founder Institute while creating my first start-up. I paid the price for that. Years of energy being deployed towards solutions that People did not adopt. Sometimes, your own failures are the best way to learn. The key point here is … how much resources are you ready to consume before significantly reducing the risk of failing? Can you spend 2 weeks of work or do you really need to spend 2.5 years of work?
Hereunder are the top mistakes i came across. I will explain you why these are mistakes and the solution will be in the other pages of Peoplelyzer Business. Enjoy the reading. My goal is to save you time so that, if you really need to learn through experience, you lose as little resources (time, effort, money) as possible.
Mistake 1: “I know what the user wants”
There is a number of variations of the “i know what the user wants” statement such as “users are stupid, they don’t know what they want”, “I know what to create for the users, i don’t need to talk to them”, “we don’t care about the opinion of the users”. Trust me, these statements come from People working in multiple organization and not just starters.
The reality is that unless you are the user of your own product or service meaning that you are creating this product or service to reply to your own wants, needs or desires, it is likely that you do not know what the user wants. True, you may have a rough idea about it but there is certainly a gap between what you think and what the user thinks.
It’s normal that there is a gap between what you think and what the user thinks. You are not in the head of the user. Unless you start talking to the users and listening to them you cannot guess their mindset meaning the thinking (ideas, principles, …) that supports their behaviors.
Is it weird to create a product or a service for a user yet not even checking with him that what you are going to build is what s/he is expecting?
The bit that i need to add on this. In your professional life you will work in companies where folks, even senior folks, will tell you they have or their teams have checked what the users’ need, want or desire. “We know”. Often it’s bullshit, they do not know. But often you are too young or junior and you do not dare to ask the tough questions. Luckily this is not my case and i have the seniority to expose the bullshit. The earlier you expose the bullshit the better. Some folks inside corporation do not like this because it exposes their incompetence, laziness or lack of leadership. I want to mention this because your time is highly valuable. You should be allowed to ask the tough questions, especially around assumptions being made on a product or service (read the page on fundamentals). If you don’t get answers or the answers sound too vague to you, dig deeper. If you encounter resistance when you dig deeper then it’s not a good sign. I highly advice to not stay in teams or worst, companies, that do not know what they are doing.
Mistake 2: “We will build X* and People will want it”
*X being a specific product or service.
Typical mistake also related to mistake 1. You think you know what the user wants so you start building a solution, be it a product, a service or a combination of both. You spend time building the solution alone or with a team and you are certain that People will love it. You are certain that People will use your solution.
The problem is that all this is in your head and there may be a massive gap with the reality. The reality will usually catch-up with you and the whole team when you launch (if that even happens) your product or service and users are not coming or they are far less users than you thought there would be. It is such a common business mistake.
The reason for this mistake is that we have a pre-fabricated understanding of success. There is a common misconception that you just need to create a product or a service and that People will come in numbers, People will use it and pay for it. Where does this hypothesis come from? From Hollywood movies? From success stories of the 0.07% of start-ups who made it to USD 1 bn in sales?
School likely never taught you how to create an organization from scratch so how could you even assume that you can create one and it will work right away? This is insanity yet so many People adopt this mindset. The person or the team is living in a dream. I have seen teams where the folks are in an echo chamber listening to a guy that promises them guaranteed success with no one in the team daring to ask the tough question or the “leader” in that team dodging the tough questions.
Mistake 3: “Our product will do everything”
One of the most ridiculous statement yet some folks need to create a product that does everything to understand that doing everything is equivalent to doing nothing. The key thing is to understand why.
I have met numerous folks who want their product or service to do everything for the user. “My service will help users to find food around them while also telling them where are the places to rent bikes as well as where is located the closest Uber driver and you will also get alerts on discounts for events”. What??? Yes, trust me, there are countless folks with similar “do it all” ideas. From their perspective the idea is not silly at all, they are sure it’s a great idea. And to make sure no one challenge their idea (aka their “dream”) they won’t talk to their potential users. Why would they do that? It would reveal how silly the idea is! It would reveal that it is a bad idea. It will touch their ego and they can’t allow this to happen. They prefer to waste years of manpower than confronting themselves to the reality. Between, it happened to me as well on a service once so i know what i am talking about.
The reality is that unless you are a monopoly or People are physically forced to use your product or service, it won’t happen as you foresee it. To understand this, you simply needs to adopt the viewpoint of a user. How do you think the user would react to the description of the above service (the app that does A, B, C, D, …)? The user will likely not get it. Is the user dumb? No. Your service just doesn’t fit his needs. Let’s try it again. “hi, my service, Wulap, is a mobile application that helps you to find healthy food around you. Would you be interested in this service?”. That is the type of service that is more likely to resonate with users. It’s clear. “Yes, i’d love that. I am struggling to know what food around me is healthy or not”. Awesome. Not only the user is telling you he would try your app but he is also being specific by telling you that he wants to know what food is healthy or not.
The reality is that products and services start with a market segment. Wechat, a chinese platform, didn’t start with the hundreds of services it currently offers. It started with a very basic chat app and then it evolved with the needs of its users. Check it by yourself. Research how the largest platforms who exist today started. They started by a market segment. Why? Because you have to start with something and this something needs to attract a certain personae. Thinking that you can attract everyone by doing everything is a non sense that you only understand by experiencing it. Would you organize a concert with all types of music at once? Well, try it and see what happen.
Mistake 4: not asking the tough questions
Many folks are joining teams without asking the tough questions about the business they are joining. If you don’t ask these questions you are simply a piece in a large puzzle. You are unlikely to understand the full picture of the puzzle yet you participate in it. How can you create value if you do not understand the organization and where it creates value for the user / customer?
Here are the tough questions:
Who is the user? Please, talk to me about him/her?
Who is paying? Who is being charged for value? Is it the user or it’s someone else?
From the user’s perspective, where is the value creation?
What type of outcomes do you create for the users?