Startup Lessons – On Not Taking Advice

When you share with someone what you do, or want to raise funding, believe it or not everyone will have an idea as to how you should take their advice into consideration when building the company. Especially if its a consumer app/product, this is great if you haven’t done any market research yourself and do not yet fully understand how the area operates as it gives you some frames of reference for where to start your research.

More often than not, I have noticed that most advice is not well thought out and can actually be detrimental if followed. I would almost go as far as to saying, only take advice from people you are selling your product to or someone that has done something as close to you as possible and even then “trust but verify.”

This is wholly true for non-entrepreneurs giving advice to entrepreneurs (especially non-first-time entrepreneurs — that have potentially had an exit or had run a successful operation.) on how to build a business in the early stages. No amount of books will teach you this. If you potentially have a large amount of experience and deeply understand the problem, you are guessing and perhaps even trivializing the effort required to build a meaningful business.

This is true in trading (equities/derivatives) where the experts all say unless if you have “blown up” your account at least once, you will never really become a real trader, it’s the agonizing pain of learning from failure that builds you out to be a battle-hardened entrepreneur. Ergo, A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. The same is dually applicable for tech, if you haven’t done it, don’t play it off like you really know. Sounds harsh but its the truth and there are exceptions.

I would go as far as to saying anyone “helping” out in accelerators should have been a EIR (in the sense they have started/exited a business) or not be giving advice as gospel. Unless again, you deeply understand the space, have past experience or the network to support the entrepreneur, otherwise, you are just occupying the entrepreneurs deeply limited time.