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How to Start the Business You’re Not Quite Ready to Start
Feat. the three gaps - Knowledge, Network, Product
How to Start the Business You’re Not Quite Ready to Start
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Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡
I’ve been thinking about writing a novel for the past few (many) years, and I got some great advice recently - “write the book you aren’t quite ready to write.”
I liked this. It was motivational and hit my exact current feelings - I wasn’t quite “ready” to write anything. So, the permission to do the thing “just out of reach” was helpful.
A few days later when I told my friend (a writer) this was helpful, he said “yep - it’s helpful because you’ll never feel ready to write any book, so you have to start before you’re ready.”
This advice is well-worn but true. And, obviously, it translates to entrepreneurs. There will never be all green lights - you’ll need to start before things are aligned or else you’ll never start.
Today, I dive into the three big reasons you don’t feel ready to start a startup. We build a plan for you to attack each.
I think of these as the “gaps” -
Knowledge
Network
Product
We help you build systems to improve each so that you can get started before you’re ready without upending your life and causing mountains of undue stress.
There are some Ruby jokes and a story about the little guy. And, turtles and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a packed one.
Enjoy!
Pod References
Pod Timestamps:
00:30 The Business You’re Not Quite Ready to Start 01:31 The Three Gaps
03:28 Why Turtles Swim Across the Atlantic Ocean
07:11 Smooth Jazz
07:40 Before You’re Ready
08:16 The Customized Diet Idea
10:20 The Notion Idea Template
12:06 The Knowledge Gap - The Expert Interview
15:51 The Network Gap - The Monthly Newsletter
17:48 The Product Gap - The Marathon Shoe and The Knowledge Spectrum
21:33 The End - Action Reduces Fear
Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:
Today, we’re going to teach you how to start the business you’re not quite ready to start.
I’m excited for this episode because the core of the advice - start before you’re ready - is about as original as singing I want it that way at a karaoke bar, but just because neither is original doesn’t make either bad.
What is bad is how most people deliver the “start before you’re ready” advice. Just telling someone to, quote, start before you’re ready, is about as useful as telling my 90 pound bernedoodle ruby to speak french.
What does “start” mean? What does “ready” look like? And how many times do I have to tell you Ruby struggles with romance languages?
99% of startups fail before they start because the founder never felt confident enough to actually give them a shot. There was a gap between where the potential founder was and where they felt they needed to be to responsibly go after the idea.
These perceived gaps kill way more startups than team or funding or competition and that’s why I’m so focused on them. Here they are:
The knowledge gap - you don’t know enough about your customer or competitors or all the other gotchas you’d imagine a business can throw at you
The network gap - you don’t know investors, developers, sales people, customers
The product gap - you don’t know how to build a product because you’ve never built a product before - whether physical or digital - and you’d imagine that first product is expensive
You might feel blocked by one of these or you might feel blocked by all three.
What you’re almost certainly feeling is that maybe worrying so much about these gaps means you don’t have the temperament to be an entrepreneur in the first place. Isn’t it a red flag that you aren’t ready to quit your job and sell your belongings and, quote, burn the boats or whatever dumb phrase is en vogue to start your business?
No. Because that’s a trope and it doesn’t actually happen.
I’ve met thousands of entrepreneurs and the best ones are the most risk averse. They aren’t interested in going after things that don’t have a chance at working and they don’t have the flexibility to drop everything - they’ve got mortgages and loans and kids. Considering these gaps just means you’re a real person. It’s a good thing.
But, the best entrepreneurs aren’t paralyzed by the gaps. They chase them down and close them. And that’s what we’ll do today.
We’ll help you build a system to attack those three gaps so that by the end of the episode not knowing how to build a physical product doesn’t scare you, it excites you. Because you’ll see it for what it is - an opportunity for you to run at something uncomfortable that everyone else will run away from. And when you navigate it, you’ll be on a path competitors can’t follow.
As an example, and to keep my skillz with a z sharp, I’ll show you how I’d close the gaps for a startup idea I’m excited about.
But first, we’ve got to talk about my sister. And turtles.
Last week my sister texted me and said she was grabbing the red eye Friday to come in from California to see the little guy for the weekend. We’re in a great little guy vintage - he can run and sort of jump and sing the ABCs. He’s only got one joke, but he’s surgical with it - if you drop something, he’ll wait a beat and then say “uh oh,” which somehow still catches us off guard. He also does it when strangers drop things - the other day at a restaurant the waiter dropped a glass and it shattered and the place went silent and then the little guy waited a beat and said uh oh and man did it land. He tore the roof off the place. He’s not even two and it’s bigger than any laugh I’ve ever gotten.
Anyway, I tell her these things constantly so she had to come in and see the vintage for herself.
My sister’s an evolutionary biologist - she got the brains - and when we were walking on a trail with the little guy and rubes this weekend she told me a story about a type of turtle that lives in Africa but lays it’s eggs each year in South America.
She said for years it was a mystery for biologists - why did these turtles swim thousands of miles to lay their eggs? What was so special about South America?
They thought of things like food availability and water temperature and tides and every other variable, but they were stumped. What the heck was worth swimming across the Atlantic Ocean?
Then, someone figured it out.
Nothing. That was the answer. Nothing was worth swimming across the Atlantic Ocean for.
Millions of years ago, the Atlantic Ocean wasn’t an ocean. It was more like a river. And, for whatever reason, the turtles lived on one side of the river and laid their eggs on the other. This is pretty common animal practice.
And then, very slowly, as the continents shifted, that river grew.
In the short term, for each turtle generation, that growth was imperceptible. But, in the long-term, the river turned into an ocean. And now, turtles spend the majority of their lives swimming back and forth across it. All because their ancestors liked laying eggs on one side of a small river more than the other and no turtle noticed as the river became an ocean.
There are two ways to think about the turtle story, and they’re both helpful for today.
First, that everything takes time. Your progress can compound if you make small, continuous, sustained progress. And, yeah, that’s a great lesson.
But the second lesson is more important and less intuitive:
Your startup will depend on you figuring out what the heck you’re currently swimming across the ocean for. What are the things in your life that have edged their way in and expanded and potentially taken over your life, like water sneaking into a crack in pavement and then freezing?
I’m telling this story to kick off this podcast because whenever I talk about adding anything to your life, and we’re going to add habits today that’ll help you close the gaps, it’s irresponsible to not first talk about removing stuff.
It’s unrealistic to think you’ve got a free hour here or there to start doing some of the stuff we’ll talk about today. Everyones a goldfish - our lives have grown to the size of our tanks.
But, reframe things a bit… what’s your journey across the ocean? What are the things you do every day just because you did them yesterday? The things that take a bit more time and a bit more mindshare and then, all of a sudden, your whole life is spent preparing for and crossing an ocean?
To really start the business you aren’t quite ready for, the biggest prep is clearing space in your life for it. To add, you’ve gotta remove. Questioning your long held beliefs is a huge part of being an entrepreneur.
And now, let’s talk about closing gaps.
After… a little smoooooth jazz.
Before You’re Ready
EL Doctrow’s got a quote about writing that I think translates well to startups. He said, “writing is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
The first thing you’ve got to do to get started on your business is to let go of the idea that your headlights will turn night into day. That you can ever be fully ready or prepared for a startup. You build a startup like you drive at night. And you can do that.
Here’s the startup idea example we’ll use today to show what I mean.
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of customized diets for a long time - basically, making sure everyone eats exactly what their body needs. And I think that, maybe, will make it possible.
The first glimpse I got of the idea was way back in my corporate VC days in the healthcare space when someone pitched a toilet that’d continually measure all sorts of things about you from stool samples. It could assess gastrointestinal health through continuous measurement of the composition of gut bacteria.
Gut health is linked to your immune system, your mental health, the development of chronic diseases, hormonal balance, nutrient absorption - it’s as important as it gets. So, if you had this toilet and you were monitoring what you ate, you could see the direct impact on gut health. You’d actually close the feedback loop of diet to health.
I think the toilet cost something like 100 grand and wasn’t viable for commercial use, but I remember the founder talking about how different people’s guts are. For some people, a vegan diet was great for their gut bacteria and meat wreaked havoc. For others, mixing in dairy and meat led to the healthiest gut biome.
It always blew me away that people just… didn’t know.
So, that’s the idea for today. I don’t really know what’s tying it together yet, and I don’t know if it’s going to be a business. It’s likely way more loosely formed than any idea you’ve probably got, but I thought that was important. The earlier you start, the better. Systems for curiosity compound like that turtle swimming, but in a good way.
So, my thesis is that there’s something we can use AI for now - probably - plus some sort of off the shelf testing tool - to help people learn more about their optimal diet. The one that’ll make them feel good and reduce their chance of serious disease.
There are…lots of gaps. So, let’s attach them.
Whenever I’m starting to explore a new idea like this I always fire up a new Notion tab. I’ve got a template for new ideas with questions and frameworks and stuff - I’m figuring out how to release this as a product at some point, but for now you’ll have to visualize it, which I know is the best use case for a podcast.
At the top of the doc is the big question:
What needs to be true for this to work?
This is a big test of your hypothesis. So, if your idea is a training program that helps people in their 40s and 50s learn how to take care of their aging parents, what do you need? A whole host of stuff - aging parents to want this, people in their 40s and 50s to want this, effective trainers, and on and on. Then, you start attacking your assumptions around each.
For the perfect diet idea, I need to be able to easily and accurately collect health data like gut biome or blood sugar or something useful. I need to be right that changes in diet do actually lead to changes in gut health. I need the foods people try to be accessible. I need early customers that really want to do this, I need to know what success looks like for them and I need to make sure that happens.
If you’re stuck on assumptions, hop into chatgpt and write out your idea and then ask what assumptions you’re making that you should test and validate. It’ll miss a bunch but it’ll get you started.
Now, the emotional side of this is just as important.
What do you think you’re unprepared for?
For me, I want to know a bunch more about the connection between the tests and gut health and how people feel. I also want to know the link to performance - will it be obvious that the “optimal” diet is working? Will people lose weight? Perform better on tests? Be stronger/faster? Sleep better?
What type of success is even possible?
Writing all of your assumptions, and what you’d like to learn, down, will make it feel more accessible. It’s likely each will fall into one of our three gap buckets:
Knowlege gap
Network gap
Product gap
So, let’s get to em.
Shrinking the Knowledge Gap
The knowledge gap is my favorite of all the gaps. It’s weird to have a favorite gap but I do and it’s my show so I’m allowed.
The reason it’s my favorite is that the knowledge gap has the most potential and the lowest hanging unique fruit. There are juicy, ripe watermelons at shoulder level all over the place but everyone assumes, for some reason, that they’re out of reach.
Not us.
You have access to every bit of information you need to start just about any business. You just need to know how to gather it.
The first method - my favorite method - is the expert interview. We want to reach out to experts in the field we’re trying to jump into and hear their experience on the problem we’re looking to solve.
I did this the other day.
I’ve wanted to write a novel since I was 25 or so, and as I’ve started to get more serious about it I’ve started to apply my Tacklebox methods to it. Since I’ve never written a novel, I’m deep in the “expert interview” part of the process - reaching out to learn from authors that have written my favorite novels, publishers and editors who worked on those novels, authors who left careers in their 30s and 40s to pursue writing, and on and on.
At the start of this, my subconscious jumped in and tried to jam me up - why would famous authors want to talk to you? What could you even ask them? What could they say that’d be valuable?
But I’m used to these internal protests and know they’re just my deep seated fear of being uncomfortable and ignore them.
First, I emailed the author of my favorite novel of all time, and the exact type of novel I’d like to write - Big Fish. I spent easily 30 minutes on the email and came up a few questions I’d love to hear his opinion on. A few hours later, his response came through. It was way more helpful than I could’ve predicted, and we’ll stay in touch.
I followed with 9 more emails to authors of books I love. Four have responded so far.
Twenty emails to editors and publishers led to eighteen responses, likely because this could be a path to a paying customer for them.
These response rates might surprise you but they shouldn’t. A well-crafted email with a question or two that make it clear you chose this person because they can be uniquely helpful usually gets answered. I’ve asked about process, about books to read, about publishing vs self-publishing, about a career as a writer and doing it on the side and gotten unbelievable answers.
Each email was different and specific and took time. Probably 20-30 minuets each with no guarantee of an answer. But, the math is wildly in favor of this type of approach. 4.5 hours of effort led to a mini board of experts. And, momentum.
For the perfect diet idea, I want to speak with nutritionists, dietitians, and gastroenterologists to better understand the connection between diet, gut health, and overall well-being. I also want to reach out to researchers studying the gut microbiome to learn about the latest findings in this field and how they might inform personalized nutrition plans.
I want to speak with founders building interesting business in the space, or, at the very least, I want to listen to podcasts they’ve been on.
Finally, I want to speak with what I’d term “expert customers.” People already trying to link diet and gut health to the variables we spoke through earlier - weight, energy, sleep, immune system.
This felt a bit overwhelming, so I chunked it out. I blocked off two hours and spent 30 minutes searching for a list of 10-15 experts to reach out to first.
Then, I spent an hour sending a thoughtful email to each.
Finally, I spent 30 minutes building my library - podcasts to listen to on the subject and articles to read.
As always, I finished with an email to 25 or so close friends, bcc’d, asking if they knew anyone in the space they could intro me to.
This was two weeks ago, and I’ve had 8 calls come from it. Five from cold outreach, and three from network intros.
Knowledge gap… closing.
Shrinking the Network Gap
The best way to shrink your network gap is to try to shrink the knowledge gap, so, we don’t need a ton of work here. As you build out an expert network, figure out where those people congregate in-person and online and make sure you’re there.
There’s a book I love by Steven Pressfield called Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be, which I’ll put in the show notes but you’ll probably get the gist from the title. Wherever your customer and the experts are, you’ve gotta be there, too.
Two conversations with experts led to two newsletters dedicated to gut health, a few Reddit threads, about 50 people on twitter and two podcasts. So, I set up my usual system to mine that information and put it into a weekly digest I can check out on Sundays.
There is one specific and highly effective method I’ll mention for the Network gap: The Monthly Newsletter.
This is a post you write monthly or every other week early on, if you’d like. The basic idea is to outline what you’ve learned, what you need to learn, and any help you need learning it. As you meet people, add them to this newsletter.
Keep it brief - always fewer than 200 words. Make it interesting. Use Loom videos, highlight anything particularly ambitious you’ve done. And, make it obvious what you need help with. If you’re asking for intros to a certain type of person, draft out the intro. Remove friction.
I get maybe 50 monthly newsletters from alums and I always read them. It’s the easiest way to track momentum and help, and I forward them to people I know all the time. It’s a serious organic growth channel.
Building the network is about finding where this world you’re looking to enter hangs out and inserting yourself there, then making sure as many people in that world know what you’re doing and where you’re headed so that they can help. Because they will, and you’ll need it.
Now, the most interesting one - the product gap.
Shrinking the Product Gap
The product gap is the scariest gap for most people, which makes sense, because most people haven’t built products before. And, products seem expensive and generally intimidating. They’re a black box.
So, how do you get started on an solving a problem if you aren’t certain you’ll be able to build the solution, either because it’s too expensive or too complex?
You remember three things about products.
First, whatever product you’re envisioning is almost certainly not what you’ll end up building, and certainly not what you’ll build first. Your first product will be a direct reflection of the first customer you choose to work with’s problem and process. It’ll likely only help one specific customer with one specific task. And, at the start of all this, you likely won’t know the customer or the task. So, whatever product fears you have are make believe.
And it’s easy to kill yourself looking at competition and assuming you’ll need all those features and capabilities, but comparing your very beginning to someone else’s middle or end is silly, and, always remember, your job is to build the single feature no one else has and ignore every feature they already do have. You build the 1% that doesn’t exist and ignore the 99% that does.
Second, nearly everything you need to solve just about every problem you can think of has already been built. Your first product will be you cobbling together things that already exist. And the cobbling tools - things like notion and zapier - are incredible and the tech you’ll be cobbling is cheap. You’re capable of way more than you’d imagine with just a notion account, a zapier account, and some youtube tutorials. And, it’ll be fun.
Third, we’re going to stack the whole product deck in your favor. We’re looking for a customer that is already heavily invested in the product you make working. This isn’t going to be someone skeptical - this will be someone on mile 25 of a marathon who’s shoe just broke and they hobble off to the side of the race and boom - there you are selling shoes in their size. If we do our job right, and we will, the bar for the first product will be exceptionally low. Your shoe on the 25th mile can be 20 year old tech. If it gets them across the finish line, it’s a huge success.
The hard part is finding the race and positioning ourselves on the 25th mile, which has nothing to do with product building.
So, how do we start?
With the race and the shoe. We need to find the 25th mile and find our runner.
Which brings us to our product method - the knowledge spectrum.
I think of all customers as being on a spectrum.
On the far left of the spectrum are people who, using today’s idea as an example, have never heard of gut health.
On the far right are people who have a fully functioning system that monitors their gut and, because of that, they’ve already optimized their diet.
When we choose the first customers we’ll build for, we start at the far right, where those customers that have it all figured out are, and we move as little as we possibly can to the left. To the folks on mile 25 of their gut health marathon. Then, we figure out what their broken shoe is. And, we fix it.
And that’s how product becomes manageable. When you learn that whatever you’re building just needs to solve a very small problem for a very motivated customer that’ll unlock a very big result.
This insight comes from the two categories above - knowledge and network.
Focus with a product is the differentiator. It’s so incredibly rare to be focused, if you can do it, it’ll be endlessly attractive to your customer.
And that’s the solution to the product gap: Focus.
I’ve only been messing around with this gut idea seriously for maybe two weeks, but I’ve already heard some interesting stuff. Mainly, a few types of potential customers have emerged - first, people looking for microbiome testing because they struggle with IBS and more traditional medicine paths haven’t worked. Second, people with type 2 diabetes. Third, people who are looking to understand what to feed their kids.
I’ll keep zooming in on these customers and their process and their problems to get towards a product that’ll have the low bar but huge value - the shoe on the 25th mile.
The product gap is one you can close.
Action Reduces Fear
I don’t cook enough to use bad ingredients.
Last week, I made my famous gluten free lasagna for a friend who just had a kid and a friend who’s about to have a kid. I went to the italian grocery store in my neighberhood that’s got the really good ricotta and mozarella and parmesan which all my italian relatives call ragot and muzarelle and parmezan but I just can’t pull off. I think it’s the blonde hair.
Anyway, I got grass fed beef and expensive tomatoes for the bolognese. I got the gluten free noodles from Italy. I got fresh parsley and basil. And the lasagna was really good. Great ingredients overwhelm my mediocre skill.
I’m comforted by the good ingredients because I’m not confident as a chef. I don’t take risks. I wait until I have those before I cook.
Building a successful startup is about confidence. About finding a customer and leaning into them. About speaking with lots of people and pulling something unique out of them and acting on it.
Confidence requires reps.
And that’s why I love this system so much. That’s why I love starting way before you’re ready. Because that action reduces the fear and increases the reps and gives you a shot to be a great chef. To not wait until you can have perfect ingredients to cook because you’re not going to be able to get them in the startup world.
You’ll never have the perfect scenario or all green lights. You’ve got to cook with what you’ve got, and, if you follow the system we just talked through, that’s plenty.
Action reduces fear.
Turtles swim across the ocean for nothing.
And backstreet boys on karaoke is never a bad choice.
Remember those three things and you’ll be in good shape.
This was the idea to startup podcast brought to you by tacklebox. If you’ve got a startup idea and a ft job, head to gt and apply. we’ll get back to you in 72 hours and can be working on your idea by the weekend.