Imagine you’re at a roulette table with 100 chips. You’ve heard of this happening before but never imagined it would happen to you… the dealer suddenly announces that for the next five minutes only, until all the seats are filled, you are allowed to make as many bets as you want and only lose a single chip per loss.
How hard should you analyze the odds? Is it more important to pick the perfect way to play, research a fibonacci model that calculates in these new odds, or just get that wheel spinning?
Startups are bets. If you can’t get your head around that you probably shouldn’t be leading one. Your starting chip stack is usually time. You can look for that perfect insight to make the perfect move, bringing six people to every call to analyze your decisions (and book followup meetings for the next day and week to keep deciding), or you can empower those six people to make 10-50 decisions in the same amount of time as long as they think the decisions line up to the goal.
Just like a great novel you will experience both internal factors that are in your control and external factors that totally aren’t. You’ll have to come up with new internal changes to adapt to those external factors. If speed isn’t your advantage, you’ll run out of resources too quickly.
Stop chasing the perfect insight, the magic bullet.
Instead shake loose the “it’s gotta be just right” and “but how do I KNOW it will work?” doubts that are great for Boeing engineers making 747s and horrible for startup founders. Instead get the action moving to generate enough activity that you’ll look back and think some of your decisions were insightful 😉
I’m happy to help you regain your momentum if you feel it’s been lost. That’s what I do 🙂