Just getting on with an idea can sometimes be the right thing to do.
I think people overthink things, especially in the startup stage where they want to raise money, and then they want to use that money for research and development. Or they want to go have some bespoke piece of software built.
Now, you know I’m a huge planner because the quality of your plan is the biggest impact on the quality of your success… most of the time.
Sometimes, all of that planning is really not necessary.
Let me give you an example. Years ago, when I was a young man, I started a party planning business. I came up with the idea on a Sunday, and on Monday I did three things immediately.
First, I placed an ad in a local newspaper to see whether I could get anybody to sell the party plan kit and the stuff that I was selling. The second thing I did was buy a book from Amazon called How to Start Your Own Party Plan Business.
The third thing I did was buy a kit from a competitor.
I knew that it would never work if I kept buying things retail, but it allowed me just to see: Would the idea work?
And I’m far from the first guy to do something like this.
If you think of someone like Mark Randolph who started Netflix. When he and his partner started, they never went through this whole, elaborate planning thing. They were sitting in the car and decided, “We have an idea. What if we mailed DVDs to people?
Well, they couldn’t even come up with a DVD on the day that they decided to try this experiment, so they put a music cd into a little pink envelope and mailed it.
From that, they found out how much it cost to mail and how long it took to do it, and they built their business.
They didn’t go back and plan it all out and talk to 100 people. They got the idea and then they started it.
The same thing applies to Elon Musk. When he started with his first electric car, he built it on the base of the Lotus to begin with. He wanted to see whether he could put this whole thing together.
And you know what? Henry Ford never came up with that idea… The idea of “Let me build a complete car immediately.” Ford came up with the idea put it all together in bits to see whether it would work or not (the assembly line, which changed EVERYTHING in industry).
So, my point is this. Speed of an implementation is crucial to success in business for a lot of different reasons. But one of the most important is it will let you know if it works. You don’t need to have the perfect thing when you begin. You can buy bits and pieces from everywhere. Just try it put it together see if you can sell it.
See whether people are interested in it. Then once you have a good idea of whether that thing will work or not, then you can build the thing out.
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