Nicolas Mendiharat

Seeking support or mentorship is anything you venture is important, but in this particular case you should focus on these types of people : 1. Customers who like what you’re doing. Even if it’s just a few, understand why the ones who purchased your products did it. If you really get the why, you’ll have 50% of your problem solved. 2. Friends, stakeholders, etc…who give you the blunt truth about what they think. Not people who want to be nice to you. Your friends can be very misleading when they just want to cheer you up. Building a business is difficult, not a cotton candy ride, so face the truth. 3. Ask the pros in your industry (even competitors!) what they think. People with no interest naturally like to help when being asked gently.

There are a lot of versions of “pivoting”. The problem with this word is that it can mean too many different things for different people. So trying to lay out a framework below which is comprehensive in most cases: 1. Don’t start with your product, but start with the value proposition. What is your product trying to do for your customers. How does it help them? Focus on 1 value prop/1 tag line. 2. Considering the value prop, define your ideal target. Focus on one major target. Doesn’t need to be big (remember Uber started with black cars in San Francisco) 3. Define your ideal marketing and sales channels to find those. 4. Build your product features accordingly. 5. Start marketing If it doesn’t work, reiterate.

One of the most important thing they don’t tell you is to take the time for “the passage” before reopening the next door. The passage is the moment between having closed the previous door, aka understood where your failure was, the process, accept it and be able to move on without regrets and the next door which is the one you choose to rebound. If you neglect the passage you might open the wrong next door, going forward too fast into another direction. That happens because psychologically you don’t want to face the void or take enough time to accept the previous fail. The passage should last several months in most cases, that’s necessary to make the right move, open the right door. Remember you can’t change the past, but the future.

In the early years, I would keep and hire internal talent for everything related to your core DNA (usually product design and your secret sauce) and external ressources for everything else you can (tech, admin, legal, sales etc...), functions you will eventually internalize partially or totally if you're successful and scaling. The trickiest is marketing because you should theoretically externalize to try different channels and methods but it's really hard to find and work with top marketing talent as most of marketing people are overselling themselves and the smartest of them are very hard to get. So ideally on this one you have a strong marketing associate internally who drives external contractors, keeping you flexibility.

Much has been said about the topic so I'm going to be a bit controversial on how you should listen to your customer: - Before you have real loyal customers, you should listen to potential customers but not as much as most of you would tell. This is because there are 2 strong biases misleading most e-commerce entrepreneurs: 1/ if they are friends and in your direct network, they're neither representative of your future customer base and they want to be nice, 2) as long as people haven't purchased your products with conviction, their contribution should be challenged - Look for what I call the "streams of bright light": when you hear the same feedback many times or a combination of interesting ideas, this is likely where you should focus

You need first to clearly set the balance between supply and demand. It starts with: - Choosing your market and whether your proposal makes any sense for future clients. - Choosing your model (BTC, PTP, etc..) - Choosing a sustainable revenue stream: if it's e-commerce likely be transaction based. Then comes the hardest part: defining whether what is more important at the beginning is sourcing/product quality or generating demand. If you focus only on one side, you won't be able to start or stabilize growth.