đŹ Talk yourself into a corner.
On the hidden benefits of talking your way to starting a hard thing.
Thereâs no going back. Thatâs where you want to get to.
We live our lives told to âkeep our options open.â But when youâre at the very precipice of launching a startup, you canât have options. Not plausible ones anyway. There must be only one way forward and that way must be to hit commit/ publish/ send.
The challenge, then, is to get yourself to that level of conviction/certainty / inevitability.
And thereâs only one way I know how: talk your way into it.
Talk about it so much that to not do it would render you the greater fool.
Itâs why I think the greatest distance between a first-time founder and a repeat founder is on the issue of âhow much I tell others about what Iâm working on.â
First time founders (myself included), worry incessantly about someone âstealing their ideaâ. You quickly realize how unlikely that is once you actually get to building. Because ideas really are a dime a dozen. Itâs the building thatâs hard. And so few people actually do it. So the risk doesnât actually lie in talking about it, but the opposite: in not talking about it enough. I can think of at least reasons why":
đȘđœ Youâll build the all-important âtalk to your usersâ muscle. In the earliest days, founders have two jobs: talk to users and build something they want. In the earliest days you may not be talking just to potential users (you may not even know exactly who they might be). But the process of verbalizing the vision in your head and getting genuine feedback on it is an invaluable one.
đ§ Youâll talk yourself past your earliest hurdles. Youâd be surprised at how much you can learn through just talking about your idea in some details - by talking about the problem youâre solving and the product and who youâre targeting and how you expect to make money. Youâll actively workshop your idea in pseudo-sprint cycles and refine the details before committing any code or buying any inventory or designing any websites. Youâll see on peopleâs faces what resonates and what doesnât. What people understand immediately, intuitively and what they donât. Youâll find your way around issues and barriers that youâd have otherwise wasted precious time figuring out on your own. And finally, youâll also start to understand exactly what your earliest hypotheses to actually test will be and youâll just focus on those.
đYouâll talk yourself into having to do what you say youâre going to do. The most important reason. In the days and months (and maybe years) before you actually do a thing, youâll think up a million reasons on why you shouldnât do it. On why itâs dumb, on why it wonât work, on why youâll look like an idiot. The trick then, is to get to a place where youâll look like the greater idiot in NOT doing it. And the only way to that place is by talking incessantly about your idea. There will come a day when youâve been talking about it so much - to your friends, your partner, your coworkers - that theyâll turn around to you and say: âJust do it already or stop talking about it!â Itâll feel harsh but it will be the greatest gift they can give you - the pressure and the permission to go and actually do it.
As much as we all like to think we are rational, free-thinking individuals, often times the only way weâll do something hard is when we have no choice.
There are fewer things I know of that are harder than building a start-up. It takes immense will and courage to willingly commit yourself to that path. But we can also get there via vanity and self-preservation.
So get talking.
Need someone to tell? Tell me. Tell the world - what wild and bold and ambitious thing do you want to build or do or create?