What is a very-early stage entrepreneur?

Are you a very-early stage entrepreneur? If so, you probably find yourself in:

• The idea phase: you think you have a good concept, from which you want to create a business, or;
• The young-but-established phase: your business is up and running but you haven’t built it to scale yet.

In either case, the central question is why aren’t you further along?

To understand this concept, and ultimately do something about it, you need to realize that in the early-stage entrepreneurial world there is good friction and bad friction.

• Good friction forces us to think competitively, to take a raw idea and shape it into something that fits a clearly defined opportunity in the market. Ironically, good friction happens when we fail early and often, investing just enough effort, intellectual capital and/or real money to find out what the market really wants.

We want good friction to exist in the business-building ecosystem. Without it, we’d have a lot of would-be entrepreneurs creating weak structures, investing poorly and losing a lot of money. The dot-com bust is a perfect example of what happens when there isn’t enough good friction in the market.

• Bad friction, on the other hand, wastes our time and resources, and prevents us from succeeding (or failing) early on. Bad friction is the stuff that keeps you stuck. Every entrepreneur experiences bad friction. Why? Because often we don’t know what we don’t know.

Even if you’ve got a great idea, there are almost certainly things missing. Maybe you can’t figure out how to make money with your business model, or find capital to fund it. Perhaps you have an internet-based idea but don’t know any developers. You might think that you don’t have enough time to commit to a project. Or maybe you’re not sure how to research the market. You may have shared your idea with your family or friends, and they don’t believe in it, so you got discouraged.

In order to succeed, you need educated, early and continuous feedback, and connections to the right resources. You can get there from here.

Find out how…