ADVICE: You Never Hit A Bulls-Eye If You Don’t Throw The Darts
By Steve Poland • February 28, 2007
Great participation / feedback going on in the comments section of the last post where readers are sharing what ideas / businesses they are working on right now.
Robert Dewey (working on own start-up Wantsy) offered up his advice:
All I have to say is that if you have an idea, go for it (within reason) … If it’s a simple concept, just go for it. You’ll be wrong more often than not, but you never hit a bulls-eye if you don’t throw the darts.
Although I don’t agree with all of it, I do agree with the part I bolded (and love that line!).
I’ve run with way too many ideas on the spur of the moment — or I marinated on them for a few days, writing all aspects of the (genius!) idea out — and then ran into development.
WHOA! STOP! Hate to break it to you — you’re likely not a genius that just came up with an idea that is simple enough to execute on and provoke adoption by users. Maybe you are, but 9999 out of 10000 of us aren’t.
Talk to people. Not just your friends that’ll nod their head — but people that feel the pain of the problem you think you’re solving. Talk to tons of people. Seriously, you’re the one with the idea (albeit likely not original, remind you) and if you start asking people — you’re the one that had the idea. Don’t just talk to 5 people — talk to 50 with the problem you want to solve and make their lives easier. Keep them in the loop — get their feedback. This is where it starts — and where your idea is going to evolve (into.. possibly something that could turn into a real business!!!).
Break-down the wall of fear that “Someone is going to steal my idea if I talk about it!” — IT’S JUST AN IDEA. Go get people’s PRICELESS feedback on your idea, evolve it, and execute. If someone stole your idea during that process, you’re 49 people ahead of them in finding out how to truly evolve it into something that will work. Execution is the key. Don’t execute until you know from 50 people’s perspectives that you’ll be executing properly.
Getting back to the point of this post and the quote — yes, you will be wrong more often than not; and you’ll fall on your face, and it’ll suck, but you’ll get back up with a big scar that you’ll never forget. My biggest fault in all of my ideas was likely not talking to enough people. It’s just like dating or finding a job or sales — it’s a numbers game. You might have to send out 500 emails in order to get 50 responses — or post 300 messages to forum threads around the web.
How many darts would you have to throw in order to hit 50 bulls-eyes? Exactly the feat you’re trying to accomplish. It’s difficult and takes time.
Your passion will show — and people will email you back, or take a quick minute to fill-out a survey. You’re on a mission to make that person’s life easier — how could they not want to help you? Get out there and throw your darts! 
Anyone share my view on this? Any real-life experiences — difficulty of getting clients, or people to give you input? The constant humiliation of being turned-down by people that “don’t get it” or don’t care about your idea? This is the life of an entrepreneur — we take a lot of abuse. People aren’t going to share the passion / enthusiasm we have about our idea — we have to shrug our shoulders and turn to the next person, hoping they might feel the idea has some potential and provides us some valuable input to make it better.
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8 Responses to “ADVICE: You Never Hit A Bulls-Eye If You Don’t Throw The Darts”
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Awesome advice! I made sure to add the “within reason” to my comment, because there are always exceptions. However, I’ve found that the at least some of the time, people don’t know what they want. It sucks, and that’s why entrepreneurship is almost like a form of gambling.
I try to portray some of the entrepreneurial pains in my blog. You might even see us do a “180″ and go for a whole new idea, but the blog won’t end there; it will continue just as the spirit of an entrepreneur should.
Excellent advice. For about six months, I tried to juggle a demanding full-time job with my venture, and for the most part saw lackluster results - basically because I was not throwing enough darts.
Since January when I decided to go it on my own, I’ve made a habit of contacting at least a dozen new prospects daily, and low and behold, the prospects have started to stream in. While I have a long way to go to make my business sustainable, seeing the results of true effort and passion is an amazing feeling.
In addition to not relying solely on friends and family for feedback on your ideas, I think managers need to not rely on feedback of peers and subordinates. Far too often in companies I’ve worked for, the CEO will turn to an intern or middle-manager for an opinion because deep inside they know the person is too scared to challenge his vision. Weeks of work will follow to execute the idea, but when the idea is presented to investors/partners/clients/etc, it’s a flop. You need to be honest with yourself in soliciting feedback on your ideas and go to the straightest shooters you know who don’t have a vested interest in telling you how brilliant you are.
[…] Steve Poland over at Techquila Shots blog brought up an interesting point. He talks about the advantages of sharing your business ideas with the public. Break-down the wall of fear that “Someone is going to steal my idea if I talk about it!” — IT’S JUST AN IDEA. Go get people’s PRICELESS feedback on your idea, evolve it, and execute. If someone stole your idea during that process, you’re 49 people ahead of them in finding out how to truly evolve it into something that will work. Execution is the key. Don’t execute until you know from 50 people’s perspectives that you’ll be executing properly. […]
I think something to remember is to take baby steps. Get something up & running, even if it’s not everything you want it to be. This way, you can cut your losses early.
You should be able to build the foundation of your business / system / whatever, prove that it’ll work, and if it’s making money, keep building it out.
It’s funny about that whole MyBlogLog BS that took place a few weeks ago… where somebody found some “bad programming” that allowed you to steal someone’s identity… maybe it wasn’t “bad programming”, but rather some “proof of concept” programming that hadn’t been rewritten after the fact.
Many times, as a programmer, I’ll cheat just to move on; if the project fails, I saved time & money. If the project works, however, I have to go back and redo that code. IMO, it works for the better.
So, yeah… throw darts. But don’t bet your annual salary that you’re going to hit a bullseye each time… start by betting a drink.
The part of this post that really rang true for me was the emphasis on talking to people. That is what “throwing darts” means. Sitting down to spend three months coding your idea before getting any feedback isn’t throwing a dart, it’s firing a canon. And if you haven’t talked to many people, you’re probably firing your canon in the wrong direction.
Yesterday I was reflecting on what I would do differently if I went back and started my venture over again. I came up with two answers: (1) I’d talk to everyone I could get a hold of about it, (2) I’d constantly ask myself, “If I could only do/say one thing this minute/hour/day/week/year, what would it be?”
Fortunately (or unfortunately) when we were attempting to start our first venture, we went out and surveyed about 300 Stanford students. The number of responses that supported executing our idea were overwhelming, but students weren’t the only relevant party, so were teachers. When we approached the teachers they were extremely apprehensive towards changing the system in place. That put us in a bit of a pickle and it brings up the issue of audience appropriateness. Obviously the most appropriate audience is not your family or friends–they’re biased, unquestionably. However, is your target demographic the only releveant demographic worth throwing darts at?
This gets back to Steve’s other post about not realizing there was a problem until it is solved. It begs the question: how do you deal with the people who are perfectly content with the current system?
It’s a tough question to answer, but I think the best thing one can do is throw the darts at them, try hard to understand why they reacted negatively and move from there. The idea will usually only be worth pursuing if they reacted negatively because of tastes and preferences/switching costs. If this is the case and your idea can pass logical muster so to speak, then stick to your gut feeling and run with it.
If you can’t honestly tell yourself that you are going to make people’s lives SIGNIFICANTLY better/easier OR they told you they wouldn’t use your product for some reason other than the fact that they like what they’ve got right now, then you’re headed for an iceber and might want to consider jumping ship.
The sad truth about entrepreneurship is that even those ideas which pass logical muster and hit the bullseyes when conducting market research can fail. Fortunately, you can always try again.
When I started the company I am working on now, we thought we had an incredible idea for a new kind of social networking. We talked to 50+ people about it and they all nodded their heads and said, “sure, I’d use it!”
Well, we were pumped. Being older (40+) we had enough experience (this is our 5th startup collectively) to realize nodding is not buying.
So, we put together a mock up and paid $20K for a series of professional focus groups around the demographics we wanted to hit (over 25).
Wow - we found out we had a terrible idea. Our approach was DOA. But, during the course of the conversation, we got back some consistent nuggets about one thing we were doing. Once we figured it out, we had the moderator push that one component and we found we were tapping into something viable as a business.
All that nodding was probably because either they didn’t want to say “you suck” to our faces or that one piece resonated strongly enough for them to say “OK, that part works for me”. We’d never know until we let someone else ask the questions to people we didn’t know.
Bob, that’s a really insightful comment.