I had never heard of this fellow before. Doing a quick skim of his website, it looks to me like his main claim of expertise is that he has successfully started a number of businesses despite the odds seemingly being stacked against him.
While I agree that it’s probably a good idea to talk to people like that, I’m concerned that they might think they know why they succeeded but not actually know. Is there a reason to believe that this fellow knows his real reasons for his success rather than just what the experience of being successful is like?
Blank’s suggestion is to get out of the building and talk to the people who with either pay you or will use your products and services. So, he’s advocating empiricism. And I’m not skeptical about the effectiveness of testing your hypothesis against reality.
There are always many factors for any economic model. You will not be able to discover all of them. To function as a business, though, you only need to discover enough of them to get to some small sustainable profitable growth. Hopefully, from there, your customers will fund your learning. And if not, it may be that changing some component (pivoting) will change your business model enough to be profitable enough to fund your learning.
Would you grant me an explanation about why ‘actually knowing’ is important?
Would you grant me an explanation about why ‘actually knowing’ is important?
Sorry I missed this question earlier. It’s not important per se, but not actually knowing when one is under the impression of knowing is a problem.
In this case, a lot of entrepreneurs who have started successful businesses have a lot of opinions about why they succeeded while others failed. But their self-reports don’t necessarily tell us why they succeeded; those reports tell us only what they think was responsible for their success. Someone who insists that their aggressive advertising campaign was essential to their success might totally miss that a vastly more important factor was actually, say, that they exude more pheromones than average.
So, I’m weary of success advice even from successful people because it’s all too common for people to be oblivious to the most potent factors responsible for their success.
I had never heard of this fellow before. Doing a quick skim of his website, it looks to me like his main claim of expertise is that he has successfully started a number of businesses despite the odds seemingly being stacked against him.
While I agree that it’s probably a good idea to talk to people like that, I’m concerned that they might think they know why they succeeded but not actually know. Is there a reason to believe that this fellow knows his real reasons for his success rather than just what the experience of being successful is like?
Blank’s suggestion is to get out of the building and talk to the people who with either pay you or will use your products and services. So, he’s advocating empiricism. And I’m not skeptical about the effectiveness of testing your hypothesis against reality.
There are always many factors for any economic model. You will not be able to discover all of them. To function as a business, though, you only need to discover enough of them to get to some small sustainable profitable growth. Hopefully, from there, your customers will fund your learning. And if not, it may be that changing some component (pivoting) will change your business model enough to be profitable enough to fund your learning.
Would you grant me an explanation about why ‘actually knowing’ is important?
Sorry I missed this question earlier. It’s not important per se, but not actually knowing when one is under the impression of knowing is a problem.
In this case, a lot of entrepreneurs who have started successful businesses have a lot of opinions about why they succeeded while others failed. But their self-reports don’t necessarily tell us why they succeeded; those reports tell us only what they think was responsible for their success. Someone who insists that their aggressive advertising campaign was essential to their success might totally miss that a vastly more important factor was actually, say, that they exude more pheromones than average.
So, I’m weary of success advice even from successful people because it’s all too common for people to be oblivious to the most potent factors responsible for their success.