Lesson # 1 - Focus on the customer!

Business ideas always evolve. You may start out wanting to build a small bungalow but end up building 4 blocks of flat. Based on my research, this is standard in business. As you learn more about your idea, product, investors, customers, employees, industry etc, you may need tweak your original idea to unanticipated needs.

This is why nothing seemed out of place to me when I started making modifications (largely additions) to my original business idea. I was paying obsessive attention to leaders in the Nigerian technology industry and start-up venture circles and making changes every time they suggested something new. In my mind, if I did not take their advice, I would end up making mistakes that would cost me dearly - after all they were the experts right?

WRONG!

These leaders and gurus knew their stuff. They explained what Business A did right and what Business B did wrong. They campaigned for the adoption of some innovative solutions. They brought light to some issues that a newbie entrepreneur may not consider.

While all of these are good stuff, no 2 businesses are the same. Different businesses have access to different funding amounts, investors, expertise etc.  As a result, what works for Business A will not necessarily work for Business B. So trying to implement everything the "experts" said ended up being a failure for me because I did not take into consideration the peculiarities of my own situation.

Most importantly, these handful of "experts" were not going constitute the majority of my customer base. As a result, they were not going to be paying clients. After having spent 3 years and LOADs of money trying to build the PERFECT system that could pound yam and wash clothes (jokes), I now realize that I should have started small, pushed the product out to the target audience to get some feedback and then make updates based on the feedback. I do not think that the "experts" were useless, I just should not have focused too much on them or taken their advice verbatim!

After all, the customer is always right!


"Lesson" series - This is in no way a prescription for how to do business or software development right. i do not have such expertise. I have been working on my web application and business for 3 years and counting and I am still yet to launch the application. This series documents the lessons I have learnt along the way.