Love Your Product Idea Less (or Not at All)
As useful as it contextually is, founders' love for their ideas is a costly trade-off. A trusted challenger can help to see when it's a good time to give up.
Founders are in love with their ideas. That's good. And bad. Mostly bad.
We take the passion of early-stage founders for granted. After all, it requires determination, self-confidence, and optimism to engage in an endeavor that we casually rate as having only a 10% chance of succeeding.
"An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down."
Reid Hoffman
Loving their product ideas is a fuel that motivates entrepreneurs to start their businesses in the first place. Remove that, and we don't discuss the odds of succeeding because, well, nothing has been started.
The Upside
First, let's look at the upside. That fuel that keeps entrepreneurs running is, after all, a pivotal element of many successful startup stories.
Succeeding with a startup is not a slam dunk. It's not a well-planned ride through wide avenues that lead you from one milestone to another.
If it were, we could lay out a development plan and build the thing in one focused effort. And yet, we know this approach doesn't work precisely because we can't know what would ultimately work.
Perseverance
When launching a startup, we are signing up for early rejection. "Sorry, this thing you envisioned, I don't want it. Figure out something different."
With not enough conviction that you are onto something, you'd give up. You wouldn't persevere after Paul Graham calling your idea a "tarpit." You would give up and not build Udemy. Maybe you’d try another product, or maybe you’d get your well-paying, soul-ripping Accenture job back.
Funding
Unsurprisingly, passion is a factor for early-stage investors when considering whether to fund a venture. While it's not a home run—not all angel investors would claim passion as an essential dimension—there's a connection between how passionate founders are perceived and the valuation of their businesses.
Curiously enough, an angel investor's character plays as much of a role in these considerations as an entrepreneur's attitude. Still, on average, being passionate is advantageous.
Performance
If that wasn't enough, passion for inventing and developing translates to commitment on the employees' end.
A founder strongly committed to their idea would, in other words, get a better yield from their team.
It's a psychology 101, really. Would we rather work for a boss who is passionate about what they do or one who is not?
The Downside
If you look at this list and think it's all rosy, then I have bad news for you. Undeniably, a founder firmly rooting for the product idea will have a positive impact on early funding chances and the team's commitment.
Yet, I'd be far from overestimating the impact of these two on the success of a product idea. Granted, you can only go so far without funding. Sure, I'd take an engaged and committed team over an out-of-the-mill workforce 10 times out of 10.
Yet neither is enough to succeed.
Preseverance, though? A different case altogether.
Pivot or Persevere...
If I'm in love with my idea, it automatically follows that—when facing a pivot or persevere choice—I will default to the latter. After all, all my emotions tell me the idea is grand, so if it doesn’t fly just yet, it’s all on the execution.
Now, if you checked the Udemy story above and picked up on the idea that perseverance is a way to succeed, that's a misleading picture. Published stories are a case of survivorship bias.
We only consider stories of the companies that ultimately succeeded. And we can retroactively connect the dots in whatever way we can. As a matter of fact, Udemy story may serve as much as an example of pivoting as perseverance. It all depends on the point in time you examine.
At Lunar Logic, we collaborate with the earliest-stage founders a lot. After two decades of such work, we see many recurring patterns. One of the most common?
Almost universally, founders stay locked within their original idea for way too long.
Perseverance keeps them trying way beyond the point it's justifiable. You just don't read these stories, because at the end of the day, there's nothing to write home about.
...or Give Up
Should these founders pivot instead, then? That's the essential question Lean Startup advises us to ask.
And it's a trap.
Pivot or persevere has a hidden assumption. It says that we must continue. In reality, there's always a third option. Give up.
Now, being in love with one's own idea prompts us to default to perseverance. However, there's a clear second-best option, too. It's pivot.
Pivoting allows us to scavenge at least some of the original idea. That multiplayer game might have been a flop, but at least the communication tool we developed in the process might secure its legacy (and yes, it's Slack's story).
Unfortunately, it's yet another case of survivorship bias.
The vast majority of product ideas—whether founders pivot or persevere—ultimately fail. The best option, thus, is to give up.
Founders' love for their ideas will make this option dreaded. No wonder, let me add. No one likes to be proven wrong.
When to Give Up?
Let's game the system. Let's start with an assumption that we know the ultimate outcome.
Assuming we're like the vast majority of startups and we will have failed, when is the best moment to give up?
Before we started. And the next best moment is now.
When you know you're going to lose a game, you don't keep trying until you're broke. You quit early. That is, unless you're a founder and a startup is the game. Then you go all the way to the very end.
Why? Because you're in love with your idea. It completely distorts perceptions. You end up acting much like a compulsive gambler in a casino. Which isn't really a recipe for sustainable success, is it?
Challenge Ideas
So, the love for our own ideas makes us keep trying way longer than we should. And it's easy to justify this behavior with stories of success, which are subject to survivorship bias.
What can we do, then?
While we can use our passion to convince angel investors to give us funds and the team to stay committed, we should challenge and validate our ideas early and ruthlessly.
That's something we can't do alone. That may be a role of a cofounder or someone external to the startup. Either way, I'd consider that a part of the startup's support network.
It’s hard to overestimate the value that a critical sparring partner can provide at the earliest stages of product development.
Role of (In)Validation
One of the things I'm proud of at Lunar is that when we run the discovery process with aspiring founders, in around 50% cases, they give up instantly afterwards.
They realize they don't have enough funds, or the perceived market is many times smaller, or there's too much competition. Even when they don't, before they start building, they try validating their key assumptions.
We invalidate 10x as frequently as we validate.
If we set out to check whether an idea is any good before committing to an engineering effort, it is highly likely that:
We will find a cheap way to do it
The outcome would invalidate an assumption
In other words, we'll get a signal that our love for the idea may be unjustified.
Gather enough of such signals, and it may serve as an antidote against love blindness.
Love is Blind
It's as cliche as it gets, but love is blind, indeed. Love for our ideas is no different.
It's an old observation that entrepreneurs tend to be quite accurate when it comes to assessing the average chances of businesses to succeed (especially if it's outside their immediate niche). However, when it comes to gauging their own odds, they seem to wear the rosiest glasses there are.
“They perceived their prospects as very favorable, with 81% seeing odds of 7 out of 10 or better and a remarkable 33% seeing odds of success of 10 out of 10.“
Arnold C. Cooper, Carolyn Y. Woo, William C. Dunkelberg
It's like acknowledging that everyone else will fail, but I will succeed. Because, well, I'm me. And I love my idea (duh!).
So yes, founders are in love with their ideas. Which is good. And bad. Mostly bad. Proceed accordingly.
And if I could make you take only one thing from this article, it’s the following. There are very few tricks as useful as finding a reliable source of challenges that keeps the unconditional love in a product idea, well, conditional on validated data.
Isn't the solution relatively easy... fell in love with the problem? or the result you want to achieve (aka mission).