Entrepreneurial experience plays a significant role in the way entrepreneurs engage in the venture building process. To understand this better, we structure this section into two – observations about novices and those of experienced entrepreneurs.
We find novices to be consumed with the development of the offering for a substantial period of their venture development activities. It is almost as if they believe that the development of the offering is the equivalent of building the venture. They align their venture developmental activities almost sequentially as if the first step is to develop the offering. The product/service is to be void of flaws, incorporating inputs on user experiences and only reaching out to the market after they have developed the offering to their satisfaction.
Experienced entrepreneurs seem to have understood the role of networking in the venture building process well. They seem to stitch together the information derived through networking to develop a road map to conceptualize and build the venture. They hold back on the offering development efforts and keep things under control on the feature addition and testing for adoption. It is possible that the learning of a single domain may be translated into templates as they begin engaging in the same domain again, but we find that entrepreneurs also find it relatively easy to transfer the learning from one domain to another.
Does this then imply that novices are poorer at building ventures, and the experienced ones are better at developing them? Not at all, these are not normative statements. Experience definitely has an advantage. If a novice gets to know how an experienced person handles the venture development efforts, it is likely that the novice could adopt this vicarious learning into the venture development process.
It is not difficult for novices to gain access to experienced entrepreneurs; these could be in the form of a mentor for themselves and their venture, or someone whom they could bounce their ideas off of despite having access where individual-level differences emerge from the nature of the guidance one seeks. As novices, it is easy to be enamoured by our ability to develop the offering and only seek guidance on how to make our communication more efficient. However, it may be more beneficial if we could get the experienced person to think about the problem we are trying to address and learn from them as to how they think about the problem itself!
If we shy away and seek only specific inputs, we may lose out on the wealth of knowledge and not see the challenges that may be highlighted by the experienced entrepreneur. Get others to work on your idea while you have them pay attention to your issues. Leverage the learning of others; your journey is too short for making all the mistakes and learning from them yourself.
Ask yourself:
Can I experience every challenge in the entrepreneurial journey? Do I have the time to develop my own solutions to these challenges?
How do I ensure I have a bird’s eye view of my business and guard myself against myopic thinking? Who are the people who would have experienced a similar challenge? Could I access quality mentors? How do I access them? What do I ask them?