Issue #16: Advice to an Aspiring Entrepreneur
Starting a company can be incredibly difficult and isn't for everyone. Entrepreneurship can also be incredibly rewarding.
While on my trip to Fort Worth this past week, I was asked what advice I would give to an aspiring entrepreneur. It led to a fun conversation about some of the things it takes to start a company. Before I started Forager, I tried starting a music video production company. We made music videos but didn’t make money doing it, which kind of defeated the purpose of a business.
There is so much to think about when building a business, like the fact that your whole team’s income is dependent on your ability to fund the business (it also depends on the output of their own work). It can be extremely stressful as the responsibilities mount and the external pressures increase. Let’s get into five key tips I would give any aspiring entrepreneur.
1. Solve a problem that you understand and care about.
Don’t try to find the next trendy thing to build. It rarely works. Supply chain and logistics encompasses so many different segments that are ripe for better technology, but you can’t just put on a blindfold, throw a dart, and hope to hit the exact area to focus. It’s so important to understand the problem you’re solving because it’s something you experienced yourself.
2. Have an idea of how you’ll make money before you start building.
You don’t need the full go-to-market motion and revenue model completely mapped out but you need a path to making money and building a sustainable business. Whether you bootstrap or raise capital, it’s imperative that you have a way to generate revenue and cash flow. If you don’t have a clear idea of who will pay for your product and how it’s going to add value for your customers, it may be hard to build a business around that product. Not every business is venture-backable but that’s fine. A path to profitability matters whether you have funding or bootstrap.
3. Write it down. Write a business plan.
Start as an outline and a one-pager describing what the business will be. Then turn that outline into a full business plan and a deck to help tell the story. You can find a business plan outline online or just start writing down all the critical aspects of your plan. What you want to build, who you’re building it for, how you’re going to build it, why you’re the one to build it, how much your customer might pay for it, and who else you need to build it with you. The plan will evolve but it’s really important to start somewhere.
4. Build a team and culture with intention.
This is something you need to talk about with your co-founder early and decide what type of company you want to build. What do you want the culture to be like? What did you like about your last company, what didn’t you like? You need to decide how you’re going to communicate with your team, what type of transparency there will be, and the expectations you’ll have of the team. Outline what you want the culture to look like and share that vision with the rest of the team.
5. Be prepared for your roadmap to change.
I had a vision for what Cargado could become and it changed for the better the day I met Rylan. Rylan had his view of how the industry could work and what technology could do to move it forward. It aligned with my vision but also had a unique twist to it that I appreciate and have since adopted. We also saw some of our early potential customers provide valuable feedback that resulted in material changes to our designs and we made those adjustments quickly. We saw positive feedback from those changes and found it made our product better.
Building a startup boils down to planning, focusing on solving a problem, and building with intention. It isn’t just a matter of doing these five things and you’ll succeed, it takes more work than that, but these are five starting points. I think there’s a massive amount of opportunity to build in the freight industry. Shippers, brokers, and carriers each represent different segments of a massive industry and you can move from procurement to purchasing to manufacturing to transportation and distribution and there’s so much more beyond that. I wrote about it a while ago that I think the freight industry is changing for the better. Hopefully this advice will help nudge someone in the direction of solving a problem they saw on a daily basis at work that they decided to solve with technology.