Are you the type of entrepreneur who gets distracted by minutia that doesn’t really matter?
Willie Sutton was a famous bank robber from the early 20th Century whose career (if that’s what we can call such things) spanned 40 years. During that time, he stole over $2 million, and, perhaps more impressively, escaped from jail four times. At some point during his escapades, he was (allegedly) asked why he kept robbing banks, to which he replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”
Seems obvious, right? And yet, humans have a strange tendency to overlook the obvious. If I had to guess, we do this because obvious things are rarely interesting or exciting. They don’t make for good stories, and we don’t get rewarded for recognizing obvious things.
This tendency to overlook the obvious is more common than you might think. For example, in a nod toward Willie Sutton himself, medical schools around the world have to teach aspiring doctors a concept called Sutton’s Law. It’s meant to remind them to not ignore obvious causes of ailments or skip obvious treatments.
A similar phenomenon exists in entrepreneurship. I see it all the time both in my role teaching entrepreneurship at Duke University and advising entrepreneurs from around the world. Every day I work with determined young founders, doggedly pursuing their quest for start-up glory, but busy obsessing over obscure and unimportant minutia while overlooking the most important and obvious fundamental concepts of building successful businesses. This, more than anything else, is what causes them to fail.
If you’re a struggling entrepreneur, the same thing is probably happening to you. Chances are, you’re so busy obsessing about unimportant details that you’re overlooking obvious but critical issues fundamental to your start-up’s success.
In case that describes you, I’m going to remind you of what those obvious things are:
1. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business
The vast majority of the questions entrepreneurs ask me have nothing to do with customer acquisition. Instead, entrepreneurs are always asking me questions about topics like fundraising, product development, managing teams, and any number of other things that don’t have any direct relationship with getting people to buy their products.
I get it. Sales and marketing — the two keystones of customer acquisition — are repetitive and often dull tasks. In addition, sales and marketing work is often frustrating because it requires interacting with people, and people are unpredictable. Control code or controlling product features is much easier than controlling a person.
But customers are the heart of your business. Without them, you don’t have anything valuable. So, while I realize raising millions of dollars is sexy, developing products is fun, and running a big team can feel empowering, none of that really matters. What matters is getting people to buy your product. Are you spending enough time focusing on that?
2. People who don’t know about your product can’t buy it
Every time I meet with founders who want my help, the first things any of them talk about are their products. It’s at that point I have to remind them of one extremely obvious but completely ignored fact: You can have the most incredible product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, nobody can buy it.
In other words, entrepreneurs obsess about the things they’re building. But they need to be equally obsessed — if not more obsessed — with who they’re building it for and how to reach those people.
In fact, your job, as an entrepreneur, really isn’t to build anything. Your job, as an entrepreneur, is to bring an innovation to market. The first step of doing that successfully is telling people about your product, which is the work of marketing. If you’re not good at marketing, nothing else about your business can succeed. You need to obsess about that above everything else.
3. Successful businesses solve people’s problems
So much press and media about entrepreneurship focuses on the entrepreneurs themselves and the things they’ve built. We hear about Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, Elon Musk and Tesla, Bill Gates and Microsoft, and so on. This makes entrepreneurship seem more like Hollywood than Silicon Valley, and the stories feature heroes with super powers (i.e. products) rather than companies with customers. The result is an entire generation of entrepreneurs who aspire to build amazing products.
But building amazing products isn’t what successful entrepreneurs do. Instead, having an amazing product is the outcome of an entrepreneur’s hard work. To accomplish this, your product can’t be the focal point of your business. You have to make your customers the focal point of your business. Specifically, understanding your customers’ problem and knowing how to solve it should be your top priority.
Never forget that your customers’ problem is the thing that matters because, ultimately, entrepreneurship isn’t about building things. Entrepreneurship is about solving people’s problems.
