Alex Kaminski's Blog

When you’re passionate about a project you probably spend most of your day thinking about it. You decide your monetization plan, the product shipping schedule, what features you should have, and everything else about your business. However, often because founders are so deeply involved in their project, they lose perspective and become emotionally attached to failing ideas or practices without realizing their mistake. 

As a business owner, you need to take a step back and listen objectively to the feedback you receive from your friends, co-founders, employees, and customers. Because unlike you, they haven’t spent the last couple of months over-thinking and over-analyzing your business, they will be more objective and not bring emotional baggage to the table. 

For example, just because you’ve always imagined your startup’s website with a pink color scheme, doesn’t make it the best choice. Often, because you’ve spent so much time thinking about your website and it’s pink color scheme you change priorities or direction to fit that pink color scheme. For instance, you may even decide to change your target demographic to be women so that it more closely fits with your color scheme. 

You can’t let your features or emotion affect your business decision making. Just because you like the color pink and have only looked at your project through the lens of having a pink color scheme, doesn’t make it the right choice. Often, it makes it the wrong choice. You need to listen to your friends, co-founders, and advisors when they tell you that they think the pink color choice is wrong. Even though, in your mind, you’ve already morphed your project to fit this pink color scheme, you’ve made a mistake in not thinking about alternatives and in making your project fit a color scheme instead of making the color scheme fit your project. 

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs were able to recognize some weakness in their business model, strategy, or product and were willing to change direction. A great example is PayPal whose founders original business was in wirelessly transmitting money from one PDA to another via infrared. Even though they spent weeks and months believing in this concept, they were able to recognize that the future was in transmitting money via the internet and not via infrared PDAs. It was this flexibility and willingness to listen to their customers that helped them be successful. 

So, although entrepreneurs are known for taking risks and sticking to their guns with great success, realize that it is a fine line between success and failure. Be open to outside criticism and don’t let your “features” become the master. Remember, a project is made up of features, but features do not create a project.