Council Post: 10 Common Startup Tips You Shouldn’t Follow, According To Entrepreneurs

When launching a startup, business owners often receive a lot of advice from everyone around them. As a new entrepreneur, it can be difficult to parse through it all and determine what truly applies to your business. 

With all the noise around you, you might be left feeling more overwhelmed and confused than before. To help you identify the right (and wrong) tips, we talked to members of Young Entrepreneur Council about common pieces of startup advice they disagree with. Here’s what they flagged as unhelpful insights you don’t need to follow when launching your company.

1. The Customer Is Always Right

Although we do want to cater to the clients or customers as much as possible, they may not always be right. No one can be an expert on everything. Sometimes, any conflicts or issues would just need to be explained and offered with the proper solutions. When conflicts or issues arise, 99% of the time, the clients understand and are on board with resolving the issues together when the reasonable explanations are provided with the proposed suitable solutions. The other 1% could happen with complete unfairness from the clients’ sides. This type of case should be assessed carefully as it could cause your own team to get penalized incorrectly and make them to burn out. – Meeky Hwang, Ndevr, Inc

2. If You’re Failing, Fail Fast

If we had taken that advice and given up at the first hurdle, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We encountered dozens of obstacles over the years and, in the end, our success boiled down to a slight pivot and a huge amount of perseverance. However, it’s also one of my favorite pieces of advice, if interpreted the correct way. Detect where you are failing and adapt. In a fast-moving world you have to be adaptive to the market or, in rare circumstances, change the market (we’ve done and are doing a bit of both). – Ben Bawtree-Jobson, SiFi Networks

3. Raise Money, Burn It And Grow As Fast As Possible

I often hear that a successful startup must raise as much money as possible, burn it as fast as possible and grow as fast as possible. Many founders accept this playbook as the only possible option. As a result, many startups that could become great businesses fail because they raise too much money too early, bloat their expense budgets before product-market fit and fail to grow as fast as VCs expect them to grow. A startup founder’s main task is to find the cheapest possible way to identify product-market fit before they raise a significant round and raise based on the growth model they found from the most appropriate investor (not necessarily a VC). – Dmitri Lisitski, Influ2

4. Give Away Your Product To Get Early Customers

While this advice may work for some consumer startups, it’s often a big mistake for those serving the enterprise. Giving away your product hurts you in more ways than folks recognize: It immediately devalues your product in the eyes of the customer and anchors your price at zero, prevents you from understanding whether there is a viable business behind your product because you lose the opportunity to evaluate a customer’s true willingness to pay and pushes you down the path of building product for the wrong customer. You need to ensure you’re building a roadmap for the right customers and a customer that is not willing to pay may not share the same product vision as those who would pay today. Prioritize the paying customer! – Imran Khoja, Just Appraised

5. Looks Are Everything

Entrepreneurs often hear that good product design is the lynchpin to success. Some people think that Apple’s success is driven by good design. It isn’t. Design is an important part of the puzzle, but if you are selling dress shoes when everyone wants Nikes, it does not matter how beautiful your website is or how seamless your user experience may be—you are going to go out of business. Focus on a large market you know well and do testing, testing and even more testing until you know what people want. Then you can build a beautiful product. – Gregor Watson, Roofstock

6. You Must Choose Between Your Business And Family

I was often told you had to choose between your business and having a family. Not only do I strongly disagree, but I’ve also been able to prove that you can have both and more. Less than 3% of female founders successfully raise capital. Additionally, less than 1% of minority female founders successfully raise capital, while less than 2% ever break $1 million in revenue. I defied all the odds. Not only was I able to raise the $1 million I needed and scale my business, I did it while being a mom and raising a family. Create a seamless work-life integration where your passion intersects with your personal life instead of having them weighed against each other. Also, surround yourself with people who believe in you and can mentor you. Never let anyone tell you that you can’t have it all. It is possible. – Suneera Madhani, Fattmerchant

7. Seek Investors

One piece of advice that startups can ignore is to seek investors to raise money. Finding traditional investors can take time, and then waiting for their answer can easily take months. As you wait for investors, your own cash flow could suffer. Many new companies have gone broke while waiting for adequate funding from banks or other credit institutions. Instead of traditional investors, I would suggest microloans. These types of loans are smaller, and they are issued by individuals rather than banks, etc. Additionally, in contrast to traditional investors who are seeking to earn a profit through interest or other fees, microlenders are more interested in the development of an idea or growing a business. They are more mission-based than profit-based. – Shu Saito, All Filters

8. Follow Best Practices

I don’t like it when people say, “follow the best practices.” There was no such thing as an assembly line before Ford, and there won’t be an improvement on it until someone else innovates again. Some practices must be done exactly, like accounting and legal work, but you should trust your gut when it comes to determining the best way to run your own business. When I started my business at 14, I didn’t follow “best practices.” I studied what existed and then used a combination of logic and my gut. Best practices are a guideline, not a strict set of rules. – Tyler Bray, TK Trailer Parts

9. Move Fast And Break Things

Long held as a mantra at Facebook, this adage of the startup world is fading away. While “done” may be better than “perfect,” I much prefer, “be thoughtful and execute things well.” Things executed well have staying power and long-tail implications. We have a team of long-tail thinkers here at BAM who will poke holes, provide and imagine the various problems that can arise when a client or even ourselves want to do something too quickly. It’s a good balance to have for a CEO like me and many of my fellow entrepreneurs who always want things done yesterday or faster. – Beck Bamberger, BAM Communications

10. Fake It ‘Til You Make It

This piece of advice gets bandied about all the time in the startup community, and it’s often a recipe for disaster. While emulating behaviors you might need to succeed—self-confidence, discipline or becoming more extroverted—can be effective, too many people take “fake it ‘til you make it” to mean that you should pretend to have competencies you don’t actually possess. In the hothouse environment of a startup, this ruse will quickly become apparent to your team and your investors. Not only will this dishonesty harm your reputation, but pretending to “know it all” also impedes you from seeking guidance in areas where you lack proficiency. Typically, this leads you to overpromise and underdeliver—a recipe for failure. – Matt Diggity, Diggity Marketing

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