Five bullship excuses you need to get over right now
Video Transcript
In this video, I wanted to talk about the five things [music] that I see prevent most people from turning their ideas into businesses. But before we get there, my name is Nick Kharalambous. I have been building [music] businesses for over 20 years. I have had many failures, blown a lot of money, [music] I've had a lot of success, and find myself in a position where I want to [music] give these lessons to people to help shortcut your path from idea to business.
>> [music] >> So, let's get into it. The very first thing that most people get wrong is they're looking for perfection. They're waiting for the perfect idea, the perfect situation, the perfect circumstance, the perfect everything, and I call Perfection does not exist. [music] There is no perfection, there is only shipping, there is only doing, there is only moving forward.
>> [music] >> And that's the lesson here is perfection is a lie. There is no such thing as perfect, there is only good enough. Good enough for you right now, good enough to take a first version, good enough to get going, get your first users, and good enough to test and iterate and build. You have to trust yourself to be able to iterate towards something good or decide when that thing is going to die, but waiting for the perfect situation to arise before you get started, you're never going to get started.
The second thing that holds most people back from building an idea into a business is the fear of failure. This one has become much more prominent as social media has come around. People are very apprehensive to talk about the thing that they're building in case people they know find out that they're building it and then they fail. So, the first book I wrote is called do, fail, learn, repeat, and I think failure is a very important part of this cycle of building because there is no fail unless you stop trying.
So, failure isn't something that you should avoid, it's something you should move because failure provides you with lessons. Failure tells you what didn't work so you can then start building what did work. If you fail with a single ideal customer profile, then pick a new one. If this business doesn't resonate with the customer, iterate and move on.
If the feature you thought was the critical path fails, build a new one. Take the lessons you've learned and move forward. You've only [music] really ended off in a failure when that thing is over. And I would even argue that if that thing that you built is over, the failure and the lessons you've learned from that failure propel you forward into the next thing.
And so you're always acquiring skills and stacking those skills towards the next thing that you're building. I'm living a life of building things. So one idea that fails just leads me to the second one that might not or the third one or the fourth one. In a career of 25 years of building things since I was 16 years old, I must have started 20 different businesses and turned them into something before I learned a lesson and then moved on to the next one.
Failure is not an end point. Failure is a through point that helps you move towards your next thing as a better version of yourself. The third complaint that I hear from most people is, "I don't have the time. I don't have the time.
The timing's not right. I need to carve out more time." Here's the thing. You only need a lot of time if you want to turn the thing you're trying to build into a full-time event for yourself in a very short period of time. I don't think we have finite amounts of time.
I don't think that that's the equation. The equation is what you want, what you can afford, how quickly you want to get to that success, and what you're willing to commit to do that. So if you want to build a million-dollar business in 12 months, you probably have to spend full-time [music] 6 days a week, 12 hours a day grinding out on your idea. >> [music] >> If you want to build that million-dollar business over 5 years, then you don't have to spend 6 days a week, 12 hours a day grinding.
You can maybe spend 2 hours [music] a day, 1 hour a day, or 5 hours a week. The first thing you need to do if you're worried about time is start thinking [music] about what is your version of success. If your version of success is to replace your full-time job as soon as possible, then yes, you have to spend that extra evening every single night going and doing the work. But if your measure of success is slightly smaller and slightly more attainable in the short term, then spend less time.
Just be consistent. Time is not your problem. Prioritizing and defining what success is actually your problem. My favorite roadblock that I hear from people is they don't have enough money to start a business.
Today, more than ever before in history, that is a lie. Today, you don't need a lot of money to build a business. And I run a program called nobullshit.co, where in 8 weeks, I take people from an idea to a live business. And >> [music] >> honestly, they don't spend a lot of money on building their businesses.
Maybe the cost of building with AI, the cost of buying a domain, less than 2 or 300 euros or dollars, and they're able to get something live. Most people think of businesses as I have to stop, raise a ton of money, and then build out for a long time before I launch this business and hope that somebody comes and I can recoup my investment. That's a very backward way of thinking today. Money is not [music] the biggest driver to the success of a business anymore.
You can easily define what your version of success is, $1,000 a month, put up a landing page, see if you can get anybody interested in signing up to the potential launch of this business, and then validating with those people if your product is right for them. That's launching the first version of an idea into something more concrete. Once you've got those first few users, you can then build and iterate with them. And over time, because you're not rushing to get rich, over time, you can build a sustainable and profitable business with very little capital investment.
The last thing that I hear people complain about when they don't have a side business is they don't have an idea for a side business. And the way that I like to help people think about this to begin with is write down every single day the things that irritate you. Whether it's your MacBook not running fast enough, the calendar app you don't like, driving to work, walking on your way to work, playing guitar. What are the things that irritate you in your life?
Can you solve those problems or has somebody else solved those problems? Find the things that bug you and turn [music] them into reframe them into ideas that could be something you build. And the smallest version of that thing is what you want to build in the end. You don't necessarily want to spend 6 months building that.
So, every frustration could be an idea. The other thing you can look at is the things that you love to do. Now, I'm not saying the thing that you love to do should become your work. I don't believe that that is true.
You should love your work, but you shouldn't do the things you love as work. But, the things that you love to do have got potential. There's lots of potentially problematic old legacy software or thinking or systems that you could then plug those holes for and launch a business out of. Ideas are a shift into an opportunistic mindset.
If you're constantly thinking you can't, you never, you won't, you will, then maybe what your problem is is just a reframe of how you see the world. Instead of it being negative and passive, it should be active and optimistic, and then ideas come to you. So, those are the five things. If you have any interest in taking your ideas and turning them into a business, then I highly recommend joining the October cohort of No 20 seats maximum, one-on-one time with me.
We grind, we hustle, and we work hard to ship every week and get your product in front of users.