7 Things I’ve Learned From Orbital Thus Far
1. You are not your product
- This is an incredibly hard mindset to get behind. Sometimes we start businesses to validate a hypothesis we have, or we wager our business’ success or lack thereof, as a reflection of our skills as an entrepreneur. This is a major fail because it equates your company with your ego. If you begin to detach yourself from your project (yes, I know. sounds counter-intuitive to being a passionate visionary) you begin to see the flaws within it. You don’t treat it like your kid who accidentally took a snickers from the candy shop, you see it like the ten yr-old who has already begun stealing.
2. Build movements, then technology
- Take our venture for instance. We have a hypothesis with Chutney: Culinary professionals want to connect with each other, collaborate on projects, and be discovered for their work globally — we believe the need for culinary meritocracy.We have many options to approach this:
- We can raise a Kickstarter campaign or reach out to the angels who have shared their interest, and fund tech-heavy work with a group of developers at Pivotal Labs to bring the concept to fruition.
- We can build a platform on existing social networks (i.e. Ning, Mightybell, with API integrations)
- We can build campaigns such as a social media based culinary awards, a 3-day pop-up culinary photo studio, and see if folks can validate our hypothesis IRL before deciding upon the need of a tech platform — which is the route we’re going with for now: movements>technology, because we’re faced with actually proving the need before getting folks, resources, and money involved.
3. Just do it
- Planning, Talking, Whiteboarding. All excuses. This is probably the single, most difficult thing to get good at as an early company. Start doing, less planning.
4. Sometimes the middle is the end
- The above is a quote from a talk by Liz Danico we were asked to see before one of our classes: Liz focused on our society’s emphasis on getting things done. (which is generally important as we see #3) But, here I’m referring to the experimental phase of beginning a company: where you get your hands dirty in all the ways you think will help you prove your hypothesis. This is what we are encouraged to do at Orbital: collect data from a variety of experiments, and then hone in on the ones that worked. This way you’ve tried it all, and let the results determine your future decisions.
5. Mentor Backlash
- At Orbital, we have an amazing set of mentors, all from different industries and walks of life. Thus, we also receive great feedback, from different perspectives. Especially in the last week, I’ve begun to understand what Orbital boot camp’s purpose is becoming: in some ways to recreate the environments that we would face as a startup in the real world. Getting loads of advice from different investors, fellow founders, and learning to as my co-founder insideourmadness puts it: tell signal from noise, in her latest post.
6. Interviews vs surveys
- We have a hypothesis, which I shared earlier. But we do don’t know all the ways in which this hypothesis is applicable to our target audience, or know exactly which segment of culinary professionals makes up our target audience. Thus, we’ve been spending the last two weeks freestyle interviewing folks. We have a set of questions that we know we want answers to, but let the conversation organically flow into questions we did not think of earlier. Then, going back, we allow some of those questions and understandings to inform our user research questions. In this vein, interviews easily triumph rigid surveys that are based on pre-disposed assumptions. As a rule of thumb, consider surveys when you need scale and bandwidth for person-to-person interviewing.
7. Less is more
- In its early stage, a startup has usually formed due to some need to disrupt or bring efficiency to an existing marketplace, facilitate a natural behavior with technology, or create a new behavior of a human itch that has already existed — due to its unfamiliarity with the world, we feel the need to over explain the business. For instance: X is a marketplace for x to do X during X. In being so specific, we do not let the idea breathe, we impose rules and regulations. Or as garychou told us about his story in describing Orbital, whose homepage currently states “A space to do awesome stuff,” instead of calling Orbital a co-working space that allows members to do XYZ, now the possibilities for what you can accomplish at Orbital are endless, depending on who decides to contribute. As a creator, that approach resonated with me. For the moment, Chutney is not YET a social portfolio platform for culinary professionals to do XYZ. And we should feel no need to call it that. Thus, we’re just setting the tone. Chutney: A playground for culinary professionals. We will let the community decide how they want to mold their platform.
In conclusion, there’s a reason this post is titled “7 things I’ve learned from Orbital thus far” and NOT “7 things I’ve applied from Orbital thus far” — We’re still experimenting and getting into the habit of thinking within this worldview.