You are avoiding feeling uncomfortable

Greg “Diesel” Williams played AFL football for Geelong, Sydney and Carlton, winning two Brownlow medals and becoming at one stage the highest paid player in the history of the sport. He had no right to be as good as he was.

Short, overweight, stocky and slow, you could always tell he was carrying a few extra kilos. If he was ever going to win a footrace, it was going to be a race to the pie shop. And yet he will go down as one of the greatest to ever play the game, because he worked out that the game was not that complicated. Just go and get the ball.

Diesel understood that he was playing a contact sport and he leant into it. He was never found on the edge of a pack like a seagull, waiting for someone to pass it to him. Easy kicks were not how he plied his trade.

If there was a ball to be won, Diesel was at the centre of the battle. He understood that getting the ball required grit, courage, determination and a willingness to take the hits. It wasn’t always glamorous, but it was incredibly effective.

When I talk to first-time founders these days, I explain that to succeed, they need to be more like Diesel. In the early days of a startup, the ball is the customer and you need to stop all your busy work and go and talk to them. I’d rather see you covered in mud, stretching for that last piece of feedback at the bottom of a pack of customers than building yet another financial forecast.

That’s it. That’s the strategy.

Early-stage entrepreneurship can feel complicated. All that talk of lean startup theory, ideal customer profiles, MVP, CAC, LTV and growth hacking can be enough to send you back to that corporate job you hated so much. But in the early days of startup life, you should simplify it and just go and talk to customers.

It is going to hurt a little bit though. Because just like AFL, entrepreneurship is a contact sport so it’s going to be uncomfortable.

Sean Parker said it best:

“Being an entrepreneur is like getting punched in the face over and over again. Eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood.”

To play the contact sport that is entrepreneurship you need to “collide” with customers, because that’s where the learning is.

You can’t win by waiting for someone else to find them for you. You cant win by sitting around waiting for the customer to come out. Occasionally the customer will appear out of nowhere and you will be on the spot waiting for them but this is rare.

You have to go and get it.

You will take hits along the way and some of it is going to hurt emotionally. Sometimes it hurts physically, but feeling uncomfortable is an indicator that you are doing something correctly.

It looks messy and it feels messy. Early stage startups are a football game in the pouring rain with mud 6 inches deep. It’s not the time for fancy moves. It’s time to focus on pushing forward with potential customers, inch by inch.

Stop avoiding the hard stuff and get at it.