When entrepreneurs believe they've made "great progress"
Dave Millman asked 5 years ago
Here’s a common situation when we introduce an entrepreneur to DE:
The entrepreneur has come up with a product idea and has begun working on their product. They believe that have made great progress, but they need some customer feedback. Or worse, their advisors TELL them they need customer feedback, and they grudgingly agree.
When they pick up the Disciplined Entrepreneurship book and study the steps, they think they are already beyond step 24 (Develop Product Plan); again, they believe they have made “great progress” on their product.
I’ve only come up with one way to engage these entrepreneurs with DE: Pick and choose a subset of the DE curriculum for the specific situation. For example, work with the entrepreneur through steps 1-5, or 20-23, depending on how far along their product is.
Bottom line: The best time for an entrepreneur to pick up DE is when they first start thinking about their startup idea. The longer they work on their product, the more resistant they are to “go back to the beginning.” These heads-down entrepreneurs probably need DE more than most. What is the best way to introduce these entrepreneurs to DE?
Bill Aulet answered 5 years ago
You have described the problem with traditional entrepreneurship approaches. They focus on the product at the expense of the customer. To me, this was one of the unfortunate effects of the \\\”Lean Startup Movement\\\” in that people focused on the MVP (see \\\”Our Dangerous Obsession with the MVP\\\” http://www.d-eship.com/articles/our-dangerous-obsession-with-the-mvp/). Design Thinking workshops can help get them off this and also showing them the Simon Sinek Ted Talk \\\”Start with the Why\\\” https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action. The Disciplined Entrepreneurship methodology is built off this concept of starting with \\\”Who is the customer?\\\” and building off this. You can\\\’t jump this step. If the entrepreneur wants to jump past this first theme, I don\\\’t let them. They may do so anyway with the quote \\\”Steve Jobs said he never listened to customers\\\” (a distortion of the truth for sure) and then I wish them luck. They might get lucky and succeed but their odds are definitively less. As it is with entrepreneurship however, we can\\\’t say they won\\\’t succeed (heck, you can get rich by not working and buying a winning lottery ticket but your odds are not good and that is not a logical strategy IMHO) but it does not make sense to me. Still, if you can convince people, you have to find people to work with who can benefit from your advice. Move on would be my advice.