You should love when people ask questions about your startup.
Be thankful for any conversation about your startup. It’s your chance to shine!
With that said, not every question is going to be fun to answer. That’s ok. Heck, it’s even a good thing that people ask annoying questions because it’ll force you to think through the tough answers.
How you handle these questions is important, especially if the person asking is a potential ally. I’m writing this piece to the folks who are at the very early stages of their startup. You’ve either just come up with the idea, or you’ve just started bringing your idea to life.
Here are three tough–sometimes annoying–questions people will ask about your startup. Feel totally free to steal any of my thoughts about how to handle them!
“If it’s such a good idea, why hasn’t it been done before?”
This question implies that all the good ideas have been done before. That’s obviously ridiculous. Limiting ourselves to what’s already been done leaves very little room for imagination and innovation.
Imagine what the world would be like if every inventor and entrepreneur used that logic. Since everyone would have to wait for someone else to do it first, then nothing would get done and we’d still be living in caves eating nuts and berries!
Good ideas don’t depend on other entrepreneurs. A good idea depends mostly on you.
Finally, it’s completely possible that someone has tried your idea before. And it’s completely possible that they failed. So does that make your idea bad all of a sudden?
Not necessarily.
At the end of the day, your idea doesn’t need someone else’s idea.
“How are you going to scale it?”
The answer to this question changes as your company grows. Remember, I’m writing this specifically for people who are at the very early stages of their startup.
Here’s a super simple definition of scale: how a company serves a lot of customers at once.
Take a restaurant as an example. To start, you might have only one location run by you and your family members. At scale, you’ve got 100 locations.
Thinking about scale when you’re just starting out is good for only two things: personal motivation and direction.
It’s fantastic to have a vision, and it’s great to have big goals. But thinking about the actual mechanics of “scale” is almost worthless when you don’t even have customers yet.
Here’s something fascinating about the people who ask you about scaleability: they assume you want to scale into a huge business.
The reality of it is that many businesses want to stay relatively small.
I have a friend who runs a fantastic roofing company. They’ve been around for a long time, and they’ve become one of the most trusted roofing companies in the area. It’s a hell of a business, and they make plenty of money. My friend wants to grow it by a couple million dollars this year. That’s it. Their family’s goal is to run a business that owns this local market and makes everyone enough money so they can live care-free.
You don’t have to have aspirations of building a gigantic company. If you find yourself in a similar spot as my roofing friend, then share that! Be proud of building a small–but mighty–business. You are the backbone of America, baby!
Now, if you do have aspirations of building huge company, here’s a response to this question: “I’d love to think about scale! It’s definitely important, but my top focus right now has to be on my first customers. It’s impossible to scale a company without them.”
“What’s your exit strategy?”
Here’s a quick definition of “exit strategy” for my super-new aspiring entrepreneurs: how you want to be rewarded for your business down the road.
There’s no hard and fast way to exit, but here are a few options. You might want to take your company public, which would list it on a stock exchange. Or you might want another company to completely buy your company from you. Some people want to run their company forever and ever, while others want to sell their company for lots of money and take a lifelong vacation.
To me, thinking about an exit strategy is a lot like thinking about scaleability: great for motivation and direction, not so great for anything else.
But there is one distinction to make between the two.
An entrepreneur’s exit strategy can tell you about the entrepreneur’s heart.
When you’re just starting out and you have only a few (if any) customers, telling someone that you want to build a company to sell it might signal that you’re just doing it for the riches. That’s not a bad thing, and that assumption isn’t always necessarily true under every circumstance.
Take me as an example.
I have one venture that I intend to run until I’m old and wrinkly, and I have another venture that I plan on selling within the next five years. Am I a greedy monster or the nicest person you’ve ever met? I guess I’ll have to keep you guessing!
But here’s what I do know: thinking about your exit strategy before you have a good customer base is often a waste of time.
So when someone asks you about your exit strategy, be unafraid to tell them that it’ll be an ugly exit if you don’t get customers! It’s something to think about sooner than later, but not right now.
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Photo: Flickr/Internet Association