How to waste 12 months working on a great business idea

[Developmental]

I need to be honest, I’ve been here for 12 months, I found the forum before hearing about the book, what a life-changer.


I have been working on and refining the same business idea for the last 12 months. Or at least that is what I would like to tell myself.

[there is a TL : DR at the bottom]

Last November/December I started spitballing ideas with an acquaintance of mine who runs a consultancy business and has been moderately successful in doing so. I thought this was a great idea, someone who is a little more seasoned than me, a couple of years older than me (I’m 24) and someone with a little bit of capital behind him.

We spent a few months fleshing out the idea and brainstorming, we would meet once a week or so and it was the same format, discuss ideas, how its going to scale and how friggin awesome it was going to be when we were big. We spent new year’s eve discussing how we were going to be in London drinking champagne in an expensive bar the same time next year after this idea has made us both very wealthy.

All he did was talk a big game and never actually got round to doing anything. At no point did we have a realistic discussion of how we would get our first customer. Those discussions revolved around “well, we get seed money, go to a software developer get it all built and then let the customers roll in through adwords”. Yea right.

The plans revolved around how awesomely brilliant our service could be when we are massive and have full reign to do what we pleased with the development of the site.

When I realised that he was doing nothing, I stopped scheduling meetings, I spoke to him socially but didn’t talk business, strangely enough, I haven’t heard from him since, it was just 2-3 months of mental masturbation.


I then went off and studied copywriting (Gary Halbert’s 30 day challenge, do it if you haven’t already, it’s awesome) and then put up a test page, basically a landing page with some copy describing what my business was going to offer and asked people to sign up to a mailing list to hear when the site was going live. People signed up at a rate of 4% on Adwords traffic that averaged at a CPC of 55 cent (37p, I’m British)

I made a revision to the site and created an explainer video with GoAnimate (recommended), paid someone of Fiverr $80 to do graphic design, created a logo and a colour scheme etc. Using this new logo, colour scheme and explainer video I re-designed the landing page into something that was far prettier and more engaging. This time people signed up to the mailing list at a rate of just over 8% on the same keywords and roughly the same CPC.


This was back in the beginning of April.


Between April and now, I have been writing a business plan with the intention of getting seed investment. This was to pay for a beautifully polished, very nicely working, very pretty fully automated version of the service I want to offer.

I’ve spent 4 months writing a business plan and am no further forward with the actual business. I was so focused on the kick-a$$ features that would set me apart from the competition and the automation that would make life so easy that I ended up entirely focused on funding. Somehow I expected to gain funding then suddenly have a business with customers.

Life has thrown a fair bit of shit at me in the meantime, depression, loneliness not helped along by meeting someone incredible that I really thought I could have been the one but over the last two or three weeks its clear things aren’t going to work out. So right now I feel really low but my business is what is going to drive me forward and lift me out of this.


[TL : DR]

Don’t rely on other people to give you motivation like I did, don’t focus on funding, and don’t focus on launching a kick-a$$ first product that is going to wipe the floor with the competition. Focus on getting your first customer. Boil your idea or service right down to its simplest form; say you spot a need for a car wash in your local area, you do your research and determine that you need to get funding for the $100k+ for an automated car wash machine, the land etc and you spend months writing a business plan and then even longer hunting down someone with the capital to fund you. You are just increasing the risks, say someone gives you the money, you still don’t have a business, but you now have an impatient investor on your back expecting a quick turnaround on their investment, what happens if no one actually cares about having a dirty car?

If you want to start a car wash get out there with a bucket and a sponge. Get customers. Get cashflow and scale or fail from there. Even if you take funding in the future, you are a much safer bet as you have an established customer base and a proven demand.

In short, I have wasted 12 months of my life thinking that I am moving forward with the business when I am not. Ask yourself a question; say you magically wind the clock back to the moment you had your idea for your business, honestly, how long do you think it would take you to get back to this moment with the progress you have made? My honest answer is that I could be back in this situation with about 3-4 weeks of work from first having the idea. But it’s been 12 months, that means I’ve been chasing my tail for 11 months.

[/TL : DR]


The service that I am going to supply would have needed approx. $200k funding for the development. In the last two weeks I have had a complete change of outlook, I am going to focus on finding and providing value to a customer. I have boiled my idea down to its simplest form, I have found 3 or 4 plugins for wordpress that can be cobbled together to allow me to provide a very basic version of what I want to do.


Today I’ve hired a freelance indian developer on Upwork to combine the plugins together into what I need them to do, he has estimated $400 so I have budgeted $800 for it, but still, I will have something that will allow me to get a customer for minimal expenditure, sure it’s not got anywhere near the features that I want it to have, but it is still on par with the competition and allows me to get to market and get customers. I’m going to have to do an awful lot of legwork in the organisation of it as it doesn’t have the automation that I want, but until I have a load of customers that isn’t a problem.

I have accomplished more in the past two weeks than I have in the previous 4 months. I could be here this time next year waiting for my business to be funded, but now I am on track for beta testing in December and a launch date of 1st Jan.


You are a wantrepreneur until your first sale

 

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[Mattie]

Don’t rely on other people to give you motivation

I think this is what separates you from succeeding and failing. It's a tough thing to stand on your own two feet and be in balance, but really it's the only way you succeed at anything. The outer world comes and goes. It says negative and positive things through opinions, reviews, and doesn't always support you in what you want to do in life. This can be relationships or business. Motivation has to come from inside yourself.

focused on funding

This is just my theory, but I've heard again and again, create the product and business, show quality, be authentic business leader, show results, and than the funding comes in different ways.

Life has thrown a fair bit of shit at me in the meantime, depression, loneliness not helped along by meeting someone incredible that I really thought I could have been the one but over the last two or three weeks its clear things aren’t going to work out. So right now I feel really low but my business is what is going to drive me forward and lift me out of this.

Life is filled with obstacles and losses. If I've learned anything in life, it is to be mentally strong and emotionally strong. I suppose it's not different than you standing on a stage and being a comedian and everyone throwing crap at you and thinking you suck. It's all in the way you react or respond to the situation. People hate you or love you. Depression only comes after you linger in grief for a long period of time. Grief is right after the event. Denial, Anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. In any order. That is normal. Give yourself time to heal. If depression lasts a long period of time then seek some kind of guidance. Loneliness is you believing and thinking you'll be alone forever, or some sort of thought similar and loss of someone or something. A lot of negative self-talk, negative feedback, and emotion stirred up in one pot.

Now in the process, you may have mental masturbated. This isn't technically failure, you succeeded at learning something. Last year when I was starting to create short reads on Amazon, I didn't know there were business writers and regular authors and there were two ways of publishing and outsourcing. There were tons of mistakes I made along the way learning about marketing, advertising, keywords, copy writing, and writing content. Now this business forum says copy write and use I instead of we. And I keep getting published by a magazine using we. So, really today I know there are different rules with publishers, magazines, and platforms. Now that can just be a confusing concept as a writer at first and learning where to apply certain techniques and how to use them depending on what platform you're using.

Now I could beat myself up every time I fail, and just wrote an article over because the editor stated something I already was doing right, but for whatever reason, she wasn't clear about what she was asking. And giving advice that didn't apply to my article. Not to mention her guidelines and the sites guidelines on how many words is not the same. I have to cut some out now again.

So, I could've got upset wasting three hours rewriting something I didn't need too, and just fixing the opening paragraph. I didn't. I understand and accept part of life is trial and error, and failure is just part of the process. Failure on my part or someone else's part. There's no reason to get bent out of shape. The main goal is staying calm, focused, and in balance so you can perform under any circumstance and not be distracted by events.

Another example, is learning Dutch and my brain mixing up words when I write from English to Dutch. Word order is backwards compared to English. It's part of the process of learning a new language and shifting from one to the other. I could get upset every time I make an error or don't get the word right. I hated it at first, and now it's getting easier the more I practice it.

Emotional attachments are what get you every time. Emotional attachments to relationships, projects, materialism, wealth. Whenever it's there for a long period of time you make an attachment. You've invested time, money, and worked hard in any of the above. No one likes to lose. It is a part of life. There are small losses and big losses. Emotion can be stirred over little things or big things. It's similar to learning to choose your battles wisely. There are some things not worth getting upset over, and other things it is justified to be upset for a certain point in time. Then you have to accept it and let it go. If you hang on to it, it will eat you up and distract you.

In my experience we even have emotional attachments to certain thoughts and belief systems. We've coped a certain way and have to unlearn those unhealthy thinking patterns, and resist the need for change. See your situation from a different angle. This was the negative angle. Now the positive angle would be, what did you do right in the process. What works. What didn't work, you just simply throw out and be done with it. No big deal. You're still in the process and growing as an Entrepreneur. What is right about you. What did you learn? What can you improve? Whether it's relationships or success, you have to evaluate what the problem is, and what you're doing wrong or right. Than see what you can do to improve the situation. What are your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and actions. Reacting or responding. Seeing things a different way from a different angle, gives you a new perception. If you turn around a painting around four times, you will see something different.

 

[Developmental]

I completely agree with you, the past two weeks or so have really clarified my life for me, in many aspects.

The one takeaway from this forum that I hope everyone has is that if you combine the right mindset with hard work, anything, in any area of your life is possible.

I think self reflection is incredibly important, identifying the areas of your life you want to improve and acting on it continuously helps you to grow. I am actually moving forward with my business, this wouldn't have been possible without the lessons learnt, so I am grateful for that. I know what needs doing and I am doing it, this gives me a feeling of achievement. A good mindset is a powerful thing, but a bad one is equally as destructive. Weeding out the unhealthy parts of a mindset isn't always easy as it is often self-reinforcing, but I'm getting there, I know it is a process not an event. I will start a journal to help with this

 

[DaRK9]

There is an awesome conference call in the INSIDERS on talking to investors by zen*******.

 

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[c19h]

Most entrepreneurs seem to go through this same thing. You think it's all about the features, but it's really about getting your first revenue. So while it maybe feels like you wasted those months, it was all about learning. Now it sounds like you're realized what you did wrong & you're on the right track.

 

[Leo Hendrix]

Sounds familiar, I was going to say, might be an idea to spend some capital on getting a working prototype built first.

Validate or test your revenue model with your first customer.

Think about licensing.

I'm nearly in the same boat as you, currently assessing quotes for my prototype via upwork and found one good team of developers from India who seem to on the ball from Fiverr.

I just need to go back and look at my Revenue model and prove it via my prototype.

Also thinking about doing it myself with Wordpress if need be, just hope I don't spend capital on a prototype that I could've saved building the site myself via wordpress etc.