Starting a business

Im am starting to better understand how to actually go about starting a business successfully. Steve Blank and Eric Ries advocate the Lean Startup method. This basically boils down to several key elements. First, do not create a full business plan, get funding for it, and then start executing the plan. You will most likely be wrong or off-base enough in your assumptions that the business will not go as planned. By the time you figure that out, many thousands of dollars and hours of time are wasted for something that might have actually worked if you had taken this advice. Start with a business idea which solves some customer problem and which you have a passion for. Then, get out of the building at various stages of the development of this idea to actually talk with customers thus testing the idea, and more importantly, getting feedback with which to re-work/iterate your business model. Blank and Ries advocate doing this multiple times. 

Two, figure out what your minimum viable product is, and start making/selling it. This stage is still part of the search for a business model however. The point of a minimum viable product is to have something beyond the idea to literally sell to customers to see if anyone actually buys it, if it is solving their problem, and to again learn more about how you can better accomplish doing that. Then you will know wheter you just need to iterate multiple more times to hone in the model, or if you need to pivot and change directions. This is possible because you have not yet invested so much time and money into the business infrastructure without knowing if you have found the successful model yet. Your organization is more nimble and able to iterate, innovate and pivot at this early stage. 

I understood all of this in my mind when I read Blank and Ries's books. However, I don't know that it had really sunk in yet. This quarter when we created a full business plan for our team projects, it became very clear to me. We put a substantial amount of time into researching and writing this business plan, yet we still had to make assumptions. These assumptions are a big deal and could lead to wildly more success than we calculated, or wild failure. I actually want to make this particular business that we worked on a reality, which makes this learning so very important to me. If we got some folks to invest in this business plan (really business idea), then I would want to start very small (minimum viable product) in order to successfully do more research and testing with actuall customers and suppliers. This would get us the information that we really need to get to the scale necessary to make a real impact in Spokane. I want to test all of our assumptions, and I want to do it while slowly scaling the business as we discover the real business model that will be viable, acheive the purpose we set out to acheive with the business, and solve the customer/community problems we identified when we started this project. 

Of course, I feel like all of this learning will still be very difficult and stressful when there is more at stake than our grade. However, perhaps it will also be much more exciting and rewarding! Here's to successfully changing business for good!