Seven Stages of Starting An Online Business-Stage 4

This phase of the entrepreneur journey is closely aligned to the previous phase of what if I fail. Both of these stages of your journey will help you in building your self confidence to execute.

It’s very natural to question oneself. Most of us do that for almost every purchase in our life. If we are thinking twice or more to make purchasing decisions, it's only a natural part of one’s DNA that will keep questioning one of the most important decisions you are about to make about starting your business.

As I said in my previous episodes, don't fight this. It’s always a good idea to question your decision time and again during this phase.

Since we are purely focused at this stage of our journey to have more answers than questions in our mind it would be a good idea to measure all of your strengths and weaknesses and catalogue the best case and worst case scenarios.

If you have been rational, have conducted enough research and due diligence at the beginning of the journey you should be able to easily put together the reasons you would succeed or fail.

There is absolutely no guarantee that by doing that exercise you will mitigate every possible issue but it will at least help you stay the course and not get overwhelmed when certain aspects of your business don’t go as well as planned.

Take it from me friends, this is bound to happen more often than not.

For any business to be successful there are many ingredients you need to evaluate and then convince yourself that you will not suck at this phase and can get through with reasonable certainty.

Some of those ingredients revolve around your service, product, market demand, your ability to scale, pricing, product market fit, key competitors and a whole bunch of other factors.

Don’t kid yourself that you can build a foolproof plan that can mitigate every aspect of this stage. What I would do is pick between two or three ingredients and run a test against them to see what the data tells you.

Data is the new gold. Period. Making business decisions via intuition is not the smartest way to get through this stage. Make sure you have data that’s predicting patterns and use those patterns to make actionable decisions.

So for this example let’s say you have decided to venture out and start an eCommerce storefront and have a product you want to sell. What I would do is conduct extensive research around the product (is it a category differentiator, is it one among many, is it beating your closet competitor on price, is is a seasonal product, can you see folks buying this product again and again, is your product a nice to have or must have and so on a so forth).

By going through this sort of a mental exercise and capturing data insights (doesn’t have to be a sophisticated ETL tool for data analysis). You can do this by using a simple spreadsheet or even a doc. You will be able to define a clear path for execution and calm the fears related to “What If I suck at this phase”.