Lessons from talking to young entrepreneurs

I love working young entrepreneurs. They tend to have so much enthusiasm for their ideas. Plus, they tend to teach you as much as you teach them. This week I was fortunate to spend a little bit of time with two young entrepreneurs from Nepal. They had found my Youtube channel and reached out to see if I could spend some time with them talking about their idea.

I was only able to spend about fifteen minutes with them. But we had a good discussion about what they were trying to accomplish. There are a few things that I personally took away from the discussion and a reminder of the biggest mistake I think young entrepreneur make.

We live in a global economy.

I have known this for some time but I was reminded of how modern technology has enabled entrepreneurs like me to run global businesses. This wasn’t the first time that I have worked with entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs or experienced ones, from another country. In fact, a fair amount of the people I work with come from outside the United States.

I was also reminded that…

Content marketing is a great way to expand the reach of your business.

People have problems that they are looking for answers to. If you produce the type of content that answers those questions, consistently, then content marketing can be a great way to attract new clients. In this case, these young entrepreneurs, from half way around the world, had found a video of mine and had decided to reach out to me. That is the magic of a global economy and using content marketing to build a brand.

But the biggest lesson I took away was that these entrepreneurs were missing a step in the process.

These young entrepreneurs had not done enough research.

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, even experienced ones, they had an idea they were excited about and they were anxious to get started. That is the kind of enthusiasm that I love to see. But, that is also the kind of thing that leads to mistakes.

Rushing head first into your business is a mistake. I’m not pointing fingers. In fact, I’ve done the same thing in the past myself. Instead you need to be spending a lot of time on research.

That includes researching things like:

• who are the key competitors in the space?
• what do they do well?
• what don’t they do well?

There are a lot of other questions you need to consider. Yet, even just answering those three will improve your chances of success.

In the case of the Nepalese entrepreneurs they were looking to offer a service that is quite common around the world. Particularly in those countries and cities that are already use to supporting startups. Still, I encouraged them to keep pressing forward. But only after they had done enough research.

Going fast has its place. Especially for startups that know they have their product or service dialed in. But jumping too far ahead is a recipe for failure.