“I just wasted a year of my life.”
It was at the moment I gave up on something I’d been working on the past year — an educational startup to teach Chinese speakers English.
The platform was basically Netflix with video lessons, downloadable PDFs, a chat system, games, the whole nine years.
And I spent a whole year coding the thing from scratch and recording over 200 videos for the site.
That’s right, 200 videos.
When I finally launched my business, you know what happened?
Zero sales. No signups at all.
A few hundred people did download the book I wrote to promote it, but the site still brought in zero dollars.
A big fat goose egg.
I hear similar stories like this all the time.
Today, I want to help you from making the same mistake I made. I don’t want you to spend a year or more of your life only to find out that no one wants your product or service.
Ready to hear the simple thing you must do when starting a business?
Don’t build your product or business before you know it will sell.
In entrepreneurial circles, we like to call this validating your business. (Look for a post about validating your business in a future post).
The concept is simple: don’t spend time on a business idea until you already have cash in hand from paying customers.
You’ve probably heard that saying “If you build it, they will come.”
Well, let me tell you…. in business, that thinking is 100% wrong.
Maybe if your company has deep pockets you can afford to take huge risks by introducing and mass-producing a product like the iPhone…
But, if you’re like most business owners, you need to have the “sell first, build later approach.”
You’re probably thinking, “Well, how do I sell something I don’t even have?”
Depending on your business model, you can build some of your product before selling it.
If you have a SaaS idea, for example, you need to see if you can either do everything for your customers manually or hack together something with Google Sheets, Zapier, and other no-code tools.
Then, if you’re able to sell that idea, you can scale up and build everything all “professional.”
And this doesn’t mean you should just hold off on creating your product before you sell it…
Most new business ideas don’t need a fancy looking website, business cards, a full collection of marketing materials, and all that other stuff that feels like doing business, but in reality, is just entrepreneur cosplay.
Sure, there are going to be some exceptions, but for the most part, you should wait to build out your complete business model until you have validated it with sales.
I’ll talk about validation next time.
