Why you shouldn’t care about having a vision.
One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face is how to address their product’s vision. In other words, they often fail to answer this question: “What does your product do?”.
The answer to such question may seem a no-brainer at first: why on earth am I going to exert time and effort on something that I don’t exactly know what it’s going to deliver and to whom?
But finding an eloquent answer to this question in the entrepreneurial religion is always tricky. Even if you already had on your mind a convincing and concise reply to this worrying question, you would still have your doubts.
A simple explanation to such dilemma is often accompanied by the hazardous low self esteem entrepreneurs often suffer from during the kick-off stage of their products. Don’t get me wrong: entrepreneurs do have a clear vision on their minds, but they are their own votaries, and they shouldn’t expect anyone to adhere to their vision in an early stage.
Future
Another problem that seems obvious is our inability, as human beings, to predict the future. This may seem a very childish and amateur analysis, but it’s the apparent explanations that we often forget about.
Not knowing which road our product is going to take is something out of the question. That’s why you shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about strategy while suspending execution. Early-stage companies aren’t supposed to find a vision for their products/services. They’re called startups because their vision is on the make. The moment a company finds what its vision exactly is, it stops being a startup, which is often the most interesting part of building a company.
Pivoting
One of the most fascinating aspects about strategy in business is that it’s neither a science nor a religion. Valid scientific theories can’t be iterated without solid evidence and continuous experimentation. Religions also have its hardcore believers who often disagree with suggestions to revisit some of the texts in order to preserve what they trust. Entrepreneurship, however, is the complete opposite: not everything that worked before can always work, and it doesn’t have holistic texts to depend on. This means that you have complete control over your product, especially during its early stage when it’s a one man job. Iterating your vision to something else is always welcomed and supported.
In Facebook’s early days, Mark Zuckerberg was thinking about the need to take Facebook seriously and start building a company that has an actual existence. The funny thing is that Mark was having these thoughts while taking a plane to his first meeting with a VC. Facebook was already a company but Mark didn’t actually comprehend this fact because he was too busy executing/coding.
Parents
Remember back in the days when sometimes we would get bullied by our parents when they see us working on a concrete study schedule or spending too much time planning on something? They would tell us to stop wasting time and go do the actual thing. This is what product guys should do: they should worry about how to get there later, because they’re the ones who are defining the product’s destination. It won’t make any sense to ask how to get there.
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