I believe in “Fail Fast”

Fail fast, or hopefully “success speedily”, is a mindset on how to setup a business idea.

As an entrepreneur, I have many, many ideas that I think would be a great business. The idea would either solve a problem, replicate an existing poorly functioning business in a better way, or become a new massively adopted practice.

I’ve heard the same thing over and over from successful entrepreneurs. Create something simple and basic first and get it in the hands of users. “Put some lipstick on the pig.” Don’t worry about the design, don’t worry about all the features you’d like someday. Create something that works, with the bare essentials. Once you have a product on the shelf, get feedback from your customers. Find out if the idea is something that people are interested in, find out what features are most necessary, and start iterating.

If no one is interested in the basic idea, there may be no point in continuing to build features for a product destined to fail. Fail fast.

The other way to approach this, is that you have to keep with something that you believe in, and don’t give up until it is successful. With this approach in mind, you can continue working on your project and not bag it, but you have to be able to turn directions. You have to listen to what the market is demanding. If your original idea is related to what people want, but they’re asking for something you didn’t think made sense, or you didn’t think of originally, then you need to be able to overcome your pride and develop what will be successful, not what you think is a great idea.

Building on something that starts basic is also a better way to program an application. If you set out to code an application that has 10 features, you don’t code all 10 and then try it to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s best if you program one or two things, make sure everything is working, and then add one thing at a time, checking for functionality at every step.

Starting a business should be done the same way.

The big advantage of doing this is cost/time savings. With so many good ideas, you want to get to the one that will be the most successful. You don’t want to spend money on something that isn’t going to make money.