Just because you don’t know how it ends, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start
When I launched No More Slaves you could see it was a work in progress. To be perfectly honest, I felt like I was showing you a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. What really makes me nervous is that I’m not even sure what the finished picture is going to look like! I’ve just started with a few of the edge pieces and now I’m working my way in.
In the past, one of my greatest misconceptions about starting a business was to think every piece of the puzzle had to be in place before I could start trading. In fact I’ve learned that one of the best things you can do is get your idea in front of real customers so that they can help you shape it. You don’t need to do a full-scale launch; just find a way of getting a small amount of your product made up and into the hands of users; or post up a small scale version of your website so that you can see how people respond.
Websites like Facebook and Twitter are a great example of how this can be done well. First, a basic site goes live, and people use it. Those users give feedback; adjustments and improvements are made, and then more people use it. Those people provide more feedback and more changes are made. It’s an ongoing process of feedback and improvement.
Mark Zuckerberg could never have imagined Facebook as it looks and works today without the interaction and feedback of its users. Similarly, few of us will ever create an outstanding company in a vacuum; we need the help of feedback from other users to help us improve. Get people to touch it, feel it, taste it, and don’t be so afraid of criticism that you don’t ask for feedback. Listen to what people are saying and watch carefully how they use your product, then use what you see and hear to help shape what you do and they way you do it.
You may not know exactly where this process of feedback and refinement will take you, but that’s ok. Just don’t ever let yourself be fooled into thinking that you have to know where the journey ends before you can start.
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No More Slaves Start-Ups Mark Zuckerberg
