Few people can quit their day job and start full-time in a new venture tomorrow. Even fewer people should.
The path to turning something from an idea to a side-hustle and, eventually, a full-time enterprise is best taken at a slow and consistent pace.
It's not what people want to hear, but it's true.
People want to hear about the overnight successes whereas there's power in the reality: hopes and dreams won't bring you success, but consistent hard work will.
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In 2013 I started work in earnest on my last company, Tweaky. At the time I was running an agency business and time was in short supply. I tried to shoe-horn work on the business in between client work, in the mornings before anyone got into the office, or any other spare moment I had.
But it was messy. Unstructured. Ad hoc. And ultimately unproductive.
I couldn't afford to go full-time on the venture, but we also weren't making any revenue and we weren't exactly a top candidate for investors.
The tipping point came when my cofounder and I set aside dedicated time each week to build our vision, and guarded this time jealousy.
Within a few months we launched our minimum viable product, signed our first paying customers and eventually raised our first round of capital to transition to full-time.
Here is how we did it.
Create dedicated time and space every week
For us to make progress every week we had to block out all of the intrusions from daily life. To do this we met up in person every Tuesday night and Sunday morning. It was six – eight hours every week with the single intention of making Tweaky into a revenue generating business.
Each session would start with a review of the previous session and the priorities in front of us. We'd then get to work on delivering the next piece of work.
It's easy to overestimate how much you can get done in one of these sessions – some weeks the total output could be a as little as a few emails to prospective customers – but we also underestimated how much we could achieve in a couple of months.
The key is not to let any other activities encroach on this space not matter what happens. Even a single week's distraction would set back our progress streak and risk the milestones we were trying to hit.
Interrogate your idea to make sure it's right for you
There's nothing more wasteful than spending years of your life working on the wrong thing.
Two years ago I was searching for my next big idea to build into a company. At the time I was working at GoDaddy which had more than 3,500 customer support people working around the clock and I was interesting in opportunities to optimise their work through artificial intelligence, "follow the sun" scheduling, and distributed teams.
I spent about two months working on the idea only to realise that while it was a great opportunity, there was customer demand and investor interest, it wasn't something I could get excited about. I mothballed the project and moved on – potentially saving myself years of loveless work.
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Most founders I meet spend as little as a week thinking of their startup idea before they dive into it wholeheartedly. If you consider that this is something that you will invest more than 10 years of your life into, it's worth taking the time to make sure it's the right one for you.
Interrogate yourself to truly understand what your skill set is, where your passions lie, and what work you enjoy doing.
Interrogate industries and ideas to understand where they will be in 10 years. Understand what your options are and make an educated decision before you jump in to the deep end with all your might.
Keep customers at the forefront
Any week that goes by without talking to a customer is a waste. Even more wasteful if you're not using every opportunity to truly understand how they work, and what they need. The best companies of the future are the ones that listen intensely to their customers and deliver on their needs.
Talking to customers does two main things.
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First it keeps you honest. You might come up with all kinds of cool ways to solve a perceived problem, but you won't know if it's relevant if you don't truly understand the problem you're solving and validate it through customer interviews.
Secondly it keeps you motivated. I've had many sleepless nights not knowing if what I was working on even mattered. Competitors launch into your same category with a boatload of funding. Or a customer churns off of your product. Or a key hire quits. You ask yourself "why are we doing this again?"
Then you talk to a customer and it all comes flooding back: you hear the pain in their voice when they talk about their problems, and the excitement when you offer a way to solve it. And then you have the fuel you need to get back to work.
Sell earlier than you're comfortable with
The lifeblood of any business is sales. You can only go so far on hopes and dreams, it's revenue that keeps the lights on.
Many customers you talk to will get excited about what you're building. Or at least appear so. In reality many are just infected by your enthusiasm. Or by wanting to support you. Or by some kind of altruism.
The true test of what you're building – and the path to graduate from a part-time, nights & weekends team to a full-time business – is through sales. This is where the rubber meets the road: do they just like you, or is this a pain so acute they're willing to pay you to solve it.
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Starting anything new is tough. It takes a lot of determination, countless hours worked, and often a healthy dose of delusion to get something from zero to 0.1.
But there is a process you can follow to bringing it closer to reality. It just requires dedicated time, working on the right idea, with deep customer empathy and turning conversations into paying customers. Your mileage may vary but this is how I've done it – working nights and weekends.
Ned Dwyer founded Elto (formerly Tweaky) which was acquired by GoDaddy in 2015. He is LaunchVic's expert in residence at coworking space Neighbourhood in May.