Everyone has an Opinion

Everyone has an opinion, especially as an early stage entrepreneur. It just seems to go hand in hand. As you may or may not know I am building a company right now. The focus in the personal finance space where we are creating a trust-based social media platform. It is a place where people can get really high-quality information that is tailored to them. Connect with other folks that have similar long term goals. The aim is to help everyone build their ideal lifestyle. As you can imagine there are a lot of opinions on how best to do that.

How to deal with all of the different opinions and perspectives

So with that context, there’s a lot that’s been going on the last month and a half. It’s been a crazy whirlwind with tons of progress and learnings. Some of the key takeaways that I’ve had so far is that everyone has an opinion. Everyone is entitled to an opinion and they can be valuable but there are some opinions that you should value more than others.

Everyone’s opinion #1

For example, this week I’ve had a few conversations. One with a former Gartner contact who used to run the tech CEO program. Companies would pay $100k to talk to this guy every year. Anyway, he gave me some really good perspective. He’s a seasoned veteran in tech and understands the New York City venture capital market and startup world. He Provided some really interesting insights from an investor perspective. Really highlighting what they really are looking. The focus is around the business and really digging into financials. The big thing is the deep technology talk about the product you can scrap in the initial pitch.

Everyone’s opinion #2

Then yesterday, I had a conversation with a CEO in the fantasy sports vertical. He built a company and then had some laws and regulations change that essentially made his business not work anymore. Now he is on his second fantasy sports company and has put all his capital into it. He has learned a lot through that process. As such he has a completely different perspective on how to approach business than the CEO advisor.

Fantasy sports CEO is the “I’m a bootstrap kind of guy and don’t take any money.” He understands how he wants to do X Y & Z. His advice is it doesn’t matter about business models. That’s not important in the early stage. What is important is getting down who your user is. Building a picture of who they are all the way down to what bar they go to, what street they live on, their favorite color, that level of depth.

What do you do will all these opinions?

There’s definitely value in both opinions. What I’m learning is that you need to take the pieces that make sense based on where you are today recognizing context as you do right. I’ve done a lot of small entrepreneurial things in my past but this is the first technology business that I’ve built. I’m learning a lot through this process and getting many different perspectives, speaking with folks that are recruiters in the space, with venture capitalists, potential investors, and users.

It’s really eye-opening to see just the different business philosophies that exist. We use the broad term of “a business person” but there are so many different approaches. You have to be really careful and selective in which advice you listen to and which you don’t. There’s a lot out there and there’s a lot of really good information. Some of it won’t resonate really until you’re actually in the field. If you are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur you can read and do all kinds of stuff. But until you are building the business and experience it first-hand some of the advice won’t click as much as it does when you’re in the field really trying to make things happen.

Key takeaways for entrepreneurs filtering everyone’s opinions

My big takeaway from this week is that you’re gonna get a lot of really good positive feedback you’re gonna get a lot of constructive criticism. You’ll also get a lot of suggestions like “oh why would you do this? Why did you do that?” People that will hear you speak very briefly and make assumptions about what you have and haven’t done. So both those people that I spoke to have no idea the depth of where the team has gone to get to where we are. It was just a quick high-level overview and then each immediately pounced on well here’s what you need to do. So context is really important. At the same time hearing other people’s perspectives when they only have certain pieces of the puzzle also tells you a lot about their thought process and also what you might think about adding to your business.

So I encourage you to listen to different perspectives but also be selective in terms of what you listen to. And I’m not saying only listen to the good things because that’s crap. Filtering for only positives won’t help you. You need to listen to the constructive advice but also, recognize if who you are speaking with isn’t quite connecting the dots, it could be that you’re not explaining things correctly or their perspective is skewed based on their experience. Their views are shaped by what they’ve seen be successful and what failures they’ve seen. You want to weigh that knowledge when you are thinking about your business, the advice that you’re taking, who you’re listening to, and who you keep in your circle as advisors.

Go broad but relevant

As such you should definitely get a wide range of opinions. It is worth the exercise, but also recognize at some point there’s a law of diminishing returns. Especially early in the life cycle of your business, a diverse range of viewpoints will be beneficial.

I encourage you to go get that insight and those perspectives because other people who have been there will have different ways of looking at things. You can see the overlap and difference from someone that has 40 plus years of experience in all kinds of different sectors have seen the whole gamut and gets paid to advise CEOs. That perspective versus a younger founder on his second company. The younger founder who had his first business fail not because the business wasn’t solid but because the environment changed. (Which is a lesson in and of itself. You can’t always control your environment but where you can maybe you try to focus there.)

So and you know that perspective of “hey I’m you know I’m really scrappy. I haven’t quite hit the huge growth trajectory of success but I know how to build a solid business with little capital. I know how to understand a problem, define it, and start to build revenue and a company.”

Think about the person behind the advice

So it’s really interesting to hear the various opinions and perspectives. I encourage you and everyone out there that’s interested in entrepreneurship to think about who you’re getting advice from. What their perspective is. What you have and haven’t shared with them that might frame the way that they think.

That exercise will definitely help inform who you’re speaking with what you want to accomplish with other folks in the future whether its investors, partners, potential hires or customers or whomever.

Thanks for reading and good luck in your endeavors!

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