Start Small and Cheap
Quick & Dirty … Rapid Prototyping … Fail Often … Keep It Simple
Dateline Istanbul, Türkiye
Start Simply and Cheaply; Get Experience Fast
Often I see Newbiepreneurs1 trying to get all the best equipment, the biggest orders, the grandest dream realized, without going through the necessary preliminary baby steps to get a functioning working knowledge of their new business.
They’ve got it backwards. Start with the cheapest, DIY2 cut-and-paste version of the new thing you want to do. Try it out. Fail. Fix it. Try again. Fail again. Fix it again. Don’t try to make the first version perfect or great or beautiful.
The first versions are ALWAYS the throwaway prototypes. So embrace that. Cobble something together, experiment, try, fail, learn, and try again.
Quick & Dirty … Rapid Prototyping … Fail Often … Keep It Simple
Many terms that all mean the same thing: Don’t be fancy … yet. That can come later when you actually know something which is grounded in experience and when you have a better idea of what will work.
The mantra of Silicon Valley Technology companies is “Fail Fast. Fail Early. Fail Often.” Elon Musk says, “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
BUT… I think if you have limited resources you should not be cavalier about failing. Use your head, quickly get a concept, then try it out.
Start simple, with used parts, pared down to the most basic items absolutely necessary to do something resembling what you’re trying to do. It will look ugly, it won’t be perfect, but it slap it together to work enough to try it, test it, have somebody else use it.
Then figure out what’s wrong with it. Re-do it again: ugly, used, rapid. Try it again. Keep doing this without using money until you’ve learned everything about the product, how to make it, how to use it, and possibly how to sell it.
THEN, you can start investing real money into perfecting everything while you are also producing and selling it. This is lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.
This technique can work anywhere: USA, Silicon Valley, Dar es Salaam, Morogoro, or Tokyo Japan.
Here’s a real world example from Kenya, but stories like these abound the world over: start simple, prototype cheaply, work hard, persevere, and plow profits back into expanding the business until it is a stable functioning system. You must be obsessed with making your business successful.
“In the early 1990s, Paul Kinuthia started hawking perfumes in the streets, making around Ksh 600 per day. He ... began supplying the perfumes to salons and offices. The hairdressers at the salons asked him if he could also supply them with shampoo. Kinuthia researched and found out that he could actually make his own shampoo. He used his Ksh 3000 to buy the necessary ingredients, a charcoal jiko, sufuria and blending stick and started making shampoo from his small room in Nairobi. The saloons loved and appreciated his shampoo and soon he was supplying the shampoo in bulk to different salons and shops. In 2001, he registered the business and his flagship brand named ‘Nice and Lovely’ became a boom countrywide. Since then the company has never stopped and continues to grow into the billion-dollar club.”3
Example Scenerios
Produce Broker
If you’re a produce broker, buy just a single crate of the item. Ship it. Get paid. Check all the steps in the route from farm-to-market. Make sure you understand all the costs and trust all of the helping hands in between. Once you’ve tested the process, expand to three crates. Then later to five.
Plow your profits back into expanding the business. Build up a network of trusted farmers, helpers, shippers, and market brokers. Accelerate cycle time of each transaction. Use technology. Be on the phone constantly to get and know the latest information from multiple sources about all aspects of your business.
Software Developer
If you’re a software developer, within three days of starting to write code, you should have the most ridiculous minimal working program. Maybe all it does is input an “h” and respond with “hello”. Doesn’t matter. It’s working. Now every time you add something, change something, expand something — well, you can run it and check that it’s still working and you get a feel for what it’s like to use your system/application/program.
When I write software, I want that cycle to work on day 1. It seems stupid but it’s the smartest thing I do in development. Do NOT rely just on unit or functional tests. Run and Use your code everyday. Dogfood4 it every single day while you are developing it.
Nowadays, every single program I write typically starts off with the following working skeleton which is bug-free:
main() {
initialize_everything()
status = do_work()
terminate_everything()
return status
}
initialize_everything() { }
do_work() { return false }
terminate_everything() { }
Wannabe film producer (or director)
If you’re a wannabe film producer, don’t bemoan the lack of equipment. Get any kind of functioning used smartphone, scrape together a rig for it and a used microphone, and get started filming your script. Learn the techniques of single camera scene filming. Get your rhythm down, absorb the terminology. Construct your own light-shaping sheets and reflectors. Find a discarded bamboo pole and use it for your boom mike.
Grab a friend to give you a hand. Film something, edit it, watch it, critique it, repeat the process again. Push that smartphone to its limits. Yes, I know it won’t have DLSR quality let alone professional equipment. It doesn’t matter. Steven Spielberg started with a handheld 8mm Brownie film camera and began filming and making his productions while he was still a teenager.
Capital is NOT your biggest problem…
…Business Knowhow and wisdom is.
Spending money doesn’t make you successful.
Any fool can spend money. Any fool can piss in the ocean and think that will make a difference. I repeatedly hear lamentations from people about not having the starting capital for a new business. But I note that they are not making any efforts to do what they can, learn what they can, and start however they can with what they do have.
The modern smartphone gives you the world of all human knowledge in the palm of your hand.
Use it! Learn! Get smart! It’s all free knowledge.
Take advantage of what you do have and what you can do and start from there.
Hammering it home
I keep re-reading what I’ve wrote and still think the idea isn’t sinking in. Especially in East Africa.
Yet throughout East Africa, I see metal crafters and auto mechanics applying these principles to keep 50-year old mini-buses running in the transportation system: they replace parts, weld steel, machine tool, and creatively repair engines with whatever they have to keep the vehicles running, whilst stripping parts from abandoned vehicles.
Same principle: Make it work with what you have and can afford. Stop lamenting what you don’t have and cannot afford. Stop waiting for an angel to give you all the starting capital that you think you want. Stop waiting for luck. Stop looking for a benefactor. Get going, get working, get doing.
Ignite yourself into Action!
Newbie Entrepreneur
Do It Yourself
Blessings, Isaac; "Rags To Riches: Kenyan Hawkers Who Went On To Own Multi-Billion Businesses"; whownskenya; February 12, 2022.
Dogfooding: the use of a newly developed product or service by a company's staff to test it before it is made available to customers.