Founder's Mindset
02
Product or Business?
Summary
Founders are passionate about their ideas. They should be. But passion doesn't always create revenue. Learn the difference between building a product vs building a business.
Transcript
One of the things we see entrepreneurs - and especially first-time founders - get hung up on is their product idea. You have an idea, you're super passionate about it. We want you to be - that's awesome. And it's only human nature for us to want to bring our idea to life and make it real and breathe into it, right?
But on the other hand, there's this temptation to build it first. This build first mindset is a really hard thing to shake because you're so excited about your product idea, and what features it's going to have. I just want to make this real. At the same time, you have to think about, "There are tons of other people that have created products before me, and most of them fail."
So there's the artist who is focused
on the the concept of bringing it to life and making it real and making it visible and showing people. And that's great, but that doesn't mean that you have a company. And when I mean company, I mean making money. You can think of this almost explicitly as spending money to build it versus a business that makes money, but we want you to be in this camp.
And there's a whole lot of activities here. If you just take the product and drop it in over here, it doesn't magically make money. There's a whole bunch of other things that need to be solved for over here. And we call it strategy. There's so much stuff to do. You're going to be thinking about different things over here than if you were just building it and it's just bringing this product, this art-clay thing to life.
We want you to be thinking about the business, how it makes money, the business model, the financial pieces, the pricing, the customer acquisition strategy, the target customer, the value proposition to offer them. There's so much over here that we encourage you to work on. And in doing that, it will inform and shape the product.
As the business model changes, as you get feedback from the market, this will change what the product is.
So we want you to kind of pull back and say, yes, you have an awesome opportunity you're willing to chase. We're so excited for that, but don't come at it with a build first mindset. Because you're going to need to choose.
Do I want to be an artist?
Or do I want to be an entrepreneur, who's building a company that makes money?