"Perfect product" and other folksman entrepreneur advice
If you search for entrepreneur or marketing advice you find out lots it is from prominent and successful people. There are websites that have collected their advice.
All that advice has been distilled into short clauses authors expect that people bother to read. But there's a problem in advice that is too short.
When a message gets short enough the meaning will come from the reader rather than the person who wrote it. Such short tips become simultaneously true and false. It starts to depend on who reads the sentences!
Big changes ongoing
The Internet has changed how people communicate and there's no return. Everything is changing in the wake.
Because the way people communicate, it means commerce and marketing is changing too.
Lot of millenials who never even had a job in yesterdays world are turning into entrepreneurs or freelancers. They study and learn their skills in the Internet.
Advice from your dog
Although many people aren't entrepreneurs yet. It's clear everybody is ready to provide you some entrepreneur or freelancing advice.
I picked up two sentences that appear often and are really great or terrible advice depending on who reads it:
- "Focus on creating a great product or service and the money will come."
- "Surround yourself with advisors."
Great product fallacy
You could create an amazing perfect product that is technically as good as it can be. It could be useful and people might use it. That's the most common way to interpret the "Focus on creating a product" -sentence. It's all the way wrong.
So you create your perfect product.. And there was no business plan. It could be a great product and it might be a success among consumers but you could even then fail to earn because nothing you create forms a cashflow to your pocket.
There's tons of product-centric people who interpret that advice like this. At the worst these people make as big "investment" as they can do and it goes nowhere. At the best they do lots of small projects and exhaust themselves out before they learn.
If you associate a great product as one such that gains you great margin then this advice is correct. What really matters to you is whether you earn anything from what you do and whether it's more than what you put in.
Few great businesses really require a flawless execution. An engineer's idea of perfect product might even be a hindrance for them because it's too expensive or too hard to market.
Great advisor fallacy
Yes, you could surround yourself with advisors. However, if you do this there are many likely things that will happen to you:
Some or all of the advisors are incompetent, their advice is bad and you lose because you believe their advice.
Some or all of the advisors are malicious, they cheat you out of your money and dump you before you figure it out.
Some or all of the advisors have a bias. If you do something they gain from it. They give you advice that directs you to do that thing, although it wouldn't be in your interests.
Some or all of the advisors care about you. They give you advice that helps you to do the right decisions.
Most likely if you don't give them anything in return, you never have the last kind of advisors for a long while. But you need to gain vigilance and smarts to prune the malicious and incompetent.
Most people are unable to do so especially if they don't give a sh*t about what they ask advice about.
Even the best advice is worthless if you ignore it. It may make you angry and it may take you weeks to bite it down.
Most people don't follow the advice about gaining advisors because one or more advisors they find turns out to be incompetent or malicious. After that they turn the whole idea down.
The advisor -advice originates from the fact that one person simply can't know everything, at least at once. Especially hard decisions need lots of information. You need information you can trust and in vast amounts and often you simply cannot collect that everything yourself.
It's inevitable you need to rely on advisors to really create value.
Afterthoughts
I've studied these things recently as I don't have enough income and I am assessing options. I don't know if it is useful in its current form, but I've found it energizing to write about this. I recommend that others try to organize their own thoughts this way as well.