"The secret to overnight fame and fortune is years of toil in obscure poverty."
I speak to many entrepreneurs who want to move fast. Often, however, they do not realize that most startups stand on assets that took years to get to the starting line of becoming the business they wish to be. Understanding what assets move into place in the months and years before "overnight" success can help us do more with less aggravation - and cost.
The most valuable asset from which one can create value is trust. And trust takes time. Ray Dalio endorses the word "believability" to describe whether someone is worth listening to on a subject. Over time, the person is either right or wrong about a given domain area. One often knows about what one is believable and can assess that. His hedge fund, Bridgewater, even has a "voting" app where one can rate the believability of others and oneself as part of a decision-making process.
Believability evolves. One must first gain expertise such that one can be believable. That expertise needs to bake into insight that is worth sharing. And then, the market needs to come to agree with that insight. With those pieces in hand, one can build a durable business.
In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggested that expertise necessary for high achievement would take 10,000 hours of practice. He points out several early factors that create the opportunity to start getting those hours early.
Ten thousand hours is a lot. Primary and secondary school is about 1,080 hours per year of classroom time - plus several hundred hours of homework annually later in the career. An average work year is about 2,000 hours. Trying to do this on the side devoting ten hours per week - perhaps the lion's share of a weekend - is 500 hours per year.
My consistent experience is that people with deep expertise make an impact - and we do not always recognize the expertise of others. Technologists look at marketers and say, "that's easy." Marketers look at technologists and think they can hire some kid to make a website for that. Capitalists look at both and wonder what value they bring since they don't have money after their super-intense training on Wall Street. Markets and technologists look at the "suit" with scorn.
Our lack of appreciation for expertise outside of our own experience is a broader societal ill these days. We have an opportunity to rise above it. The "man-month" is mythical within a domain, not across them. If we can trust and leverage each other's complementary skills, a team can be believable and actionable faster and across a more useful applied domain more quickly.
For example, researching a market backed by deep expertise can generate what Challenger Customer authors Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon call "commercial insight."
But the idea is never about your cool technology - the idea is about the customers themselves. Who are they, and what do they want to become? Gain an empathy with the customer base that turns into an ambition that furthers their desires.
Even now, having invested first in building expertise and then in understanding a market, one has just an idea - a seed. The transition now is helping the market understand itself this way too. For this idea to take root, one needs - you guessed it - time.
Adamson and Dixon estimate that a commercial insight takes 12-18 months to penetrate a market before it starts to affect sales. While they don't say so specifically, I believe this figure assumes the vendor is already credible in the space.
That becomes a building window! The market is warming to your idea. Now you get in a position to serve the market with the answer to the problem.
So 10,000 hours to gain expertise and reputation, another year and a half for the market insight to "take." And then overnight success! You provide a solution for which the market is ready!
Maybe?
The work of delivery begins. You built expertise and believability on the question - and perhaps on the method of the answer. Now, the venture needs to build credibility on the ability to deliver.
Entrepreneurship can be "the strong and slow boring of hard boards," to misquote Max Weber. It is work, and it takes time.
I offer the preceding by way of permitting yourself to take time. Understand where you are in the process, and invest in a way that lets you survive to gain your market insight and plant it back in your market. Invest in your education to gain that expertise. Lean on people you trust, rather than trying to be an expert in many domains - that's a lot of hours!
So what lesson can we take from a startup that isn't getting as much traction? One possibility is that the commercial insight has not yet taken root in the market. But when that insight grows into a market movement, the journey it takes customers on will lead to your door.
Overnight success will take time - give it eighteen months.
Photo by Iva Rajović on Unsplash