“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot
I love this quote. Either you haven’t been through it and it just sounds like any old saying. Or you have been through it and you can physically feel it.
Customer Development when building a new web business gives you exactly this feeling. You set out on a journey with clean and exciting vision and direction, then you end up back where you started, with less energy and less confidence. It didn’t quite work out. You didn’t quite get the results.
But you should be excited. Very excited.
All you had last time at this position was the vision and direction. Now you’ve got vision and wisdom, not much but a little bit. That’s great! Your next direction should be a little bit stronger.
There is no guarantee on better results, it might be worse, but at least you’re trying and learning. What we can guarantee is that you’re first attempt to start a new web business will not work. I don’t care how good you are, how much research you’ve done and how unique your idea is. As they say, no plan survives contact with the enemy (or customers).
So it’s not a question of if you’ll learn, but how fast.
We’ve felt this over the past week on a couple on the customer development projects we are working on and it can cause a bit of anguish and frustration. However, it’s a lot lot lot lot better than spending a big pile of money and taking six months to learn the same lessons and have more anguish. So this post is to myself, our team and our startup partners to be happy where we are and to be excited for another week of creating a new business.
Take a deep breath, and go again.