If you’re just starting out on a new venture, you should have one ambition: to prove the idea as quickly as possible. If you’re business is a lemon and isn’t going to work that’s completely fine. Most start-ups – especially innovative start-ups – fail for one reason or another.  Your early priority in a start-up should therefore be to prove your concept and, if it is a lemon, ripen it quickly so you can move on.

This sounds obvious but when you’re there in the game, passionately pursuing your idea that you have 100% belief in -and it’s your job to get everyone else to have 100% belief in it – it’s easy to forget that you need to prove the idea objectively. And there are often many, many things that get in the way of proving an idea. You may feel that you need to build it properly before you can objectively test it. You may feel that an early version of your product doesn’t do the idea justice. You may feel you haven’t pushed the marketing hard enough or well enough. There are lots of reasons you can look for to try to say why you haven’t been able to prove your concept early. In reality, most will be you trying to obscure the fact that you’ve got a lemon.  Therefore, as an entrepreneur, from day one you should know exactly how you are going to prove their concept or product, and listen to the results of that test.

I was listening to Fred Destin of Atlas Ventures speak recently and he described the three phrases of starting up. Very simply these are:

Prove it

Build it

Scale it

Again this sounds obvious but it really is spot on. At Wigadoo, my last company, we were certainly guilty of mixing “prove it” and “build it”. We started to build a company around an unproven concept. We constantly looked for proof but would happily fall back on excuses when that proof wasn’t coming easily and would push on all the same.

Another useful piece of advice I received was from William Reeve, one of the founders of Love Film, who is now an entrepreneur-in-residence at DFJ Esprit. He said, “if an entrepreneur ever tells me that their waiting for the next version of the product and then they expect everything to pick up, I know they’re in real trouble.” In general, if your concept isn’t sufficiently desired or needed by customers such that people won’t use it unless it’s fully polished, you know there’s something wrong. In this case, you should be concerning yourself with the proposition, not the product.

All in all, I think there’s a lot to be said for having your main ambition when you’re setting out as to try and ripen your lemon. If it doesn’t ripen then you’re onto a winner. If it ripens, that’s great and you can move on to the next thing quickly. You’re better to ripen three lemons in three years than to ripen one in the same time frame. The more you try, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more likely you are to succeed.

Photo courtesy of Flickr: Kretyen

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