"Don't give me a position. Give me a vector." - Miami Vice
When I talk with entrepreneurs about their efforts, the conversation moves quickly to their creations. The features of the product. The aspects of which they are proud - and the many about which they feel a different way.
Some business advice focuses on telling people to "just ship." The crux is to make contact with the market in an imperfect vehicle. The market will tell you how to perfect it far more effectively than your preconceptions will.
This advice is better than navel-gazing - but still missing the point. The objective of innovation is to create that which is new - to instigate change. We need to understand the difference we want to see in the market and tie ourselves to making that change happen.
This commitment to change agency is the "why" of entrepreneurship. Getting a grip on that change is the key to guiding your venture in a meaningful and profitable direction.
What is the least costly way of making that change happen? Can you make it happen without needing to build a business? A decade ago, this was a silly question - the point of entrepreneurship was to create a business.
No more. Nascent business seems so 1990s. The press talks about founders, and social media celebrates creators. We technologists look to open source as a new frontier. We can create productivity gain without the requirement or expectation of financial investment. We make changes, not products.
I learned about the "north star metric" mainly from Matt Lerner. He says to track a leading indicator of whether the customers are gaining value. Using my construction here, the thing to measure is whether your change is happening. The great thing about this idea of the metric is that it applies well beyond products - it can apply to the various ways we can make change happen.
We can make a difference via methods that are not necessarily moneymakers. For example, one can provide education on a topic via a blog post. For another, one can offer an open-source alternative. One could give a talk at a meetup or a conference to educate the community.
We should celebrate when these are enough to make the change! In this case, the business would not create enough economic value to be worth that direction. You have also poisoned the well for other companies that would require a profit motive to enter the field. By offering value at the outset, you make the change you seek in the world and filter down the part of the problem that requires commerce.
And commerce should be necessary: selling unnecessary goods is taking from the market, not contributing. I suppose that's a business model for some, but I take a moral view of capitalism: the market compensates entrepreneurs for the positive change we make in the world. The aggressive but positive move is to cut out such a parasitic actor by offering the solution for its correct price: zero.
When one looks from this perspective, one sees that you start with a mission - the "why" at the center of Simon Sinek's golden circle. The "why" is this change you want to bring to the market.
When you understand that change - and better yet, when you can measure it - you can proceed to your "how" - solutions and mechanisms for effecting that change.
I use the word "effecting" advisedly in the sense of "making happen." The founder pours a base layer for a new way of doing things. The creator creates. Seth Godin likes the term "instigator" - and I like the roguish connotations of that too.
The mechanisms by which one instigates should have three drivers. First, it should drive the change one wishes to make - and do it well. Second, it must be a fit for the market. The right tool for one tribe is not correct for another. Finally, the skillset of the founder/creator/instigator matters. One cannot change without some skill in making it happen. At this intersection is opportunity.
We still build solutions, tools, and content to make the change happen. But we should be otherwise agnostic. Eric Ries's research in Lean Startup and validated learning methodologies to discover what works are excellent guides to this end.
And when we find it, we turn that crank.
The controversial part about the above is that the answer is not always a product; it rarely is. That which was solved by service a decade ago and by-product today may be more meaningfully changed by new modalities we do not have a handle on yet. These may come from communities and collective action. They may come from open-source-ish approaches to applying intellectual property. And we will need to figure out how to make money to perpetuate that change.
Found. Create. Instigate. Make change happen, and we are doing our jobs for the world. And more importantly, we maximize the chance to make a venture out of our change succeed.
Photo by Mathias Jensen on Unsplash