Find Your Beginning
For the first several months as an entrepreneur, I partnered with an old acquaintance who runs a digital marketing agency where I did engineering consulting and hands-on development work. After a while, I had begun to realize that the typical freelancing agency work wasn’t what I was after. At the same time, I had also explored the prospects of career coaching. With my industry knowledge, certainly there would be some opportunities there. So, I tried that for a short while, but I had also quickly learned that it, too, really wasn’t the path for me.
At this point, I had begun to feel defeated, like I was never actually starting. I had the broader vision of my business planned out in my mind, but it felt like everything just kept pushing my starting point out further and further. I had started to refer to these experiences as false starts.
The importance of a strong feedback loop
There’s an incredibly simple, yet powerful framework that pairs up nicely with the concept of micro-entrepreneurship: Build-Measure-Learn (BML). And while this framework can be a very effective way to approach product development, it can also be used for almost all facets of micro-entrepreneurship.
In the context of business experiences that we face, BML can be applied as a simple lens in which to introspect and quantify these starting moments of trial and error, or false starts. That’s because when you’re first starting out, there will be false starts. I think they’re completely inevitable. But how you learn from them is up to you.
For the sake of this article, approaching BML in simple terms is all that’s necessary. “Build” includes not only constructs that are actual products and services, but also ones that represent business relationships, business agreements, and business arrangements, which all generally distill down to your own personal emotional experiences. After all, one of the main reasons as to why we do this sort of work in charting our own journey as entrepreneurs is due to the way in which it makes us feel.
In fact, I’d argue that how these experiences make you feel may be the biggest indicator of all during the “Measure” portion of the loop when reflecting upon a false start. Do I enjoy this work? Is this a good application of my skills? Is this building toward the greater vision I seek? From there, you “Learn” when it’s been decided to either pivot or persevere, where insights are applied to the next endeavor.
It will take some time to feel like the journey actually started.
From my own experience, it took a few rounds of this loop to feel like I was finally ready to start building my journey. But once your initial experiences begin to filter through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop, your longer-term vision and its true starting point will come into focus quite rapidly.
In short, you won’t really know what you like or what you want to do on a day-to-day basis unless you do it. And the sooner you realize that something isn’t a fit, drop it! Remember, with micro-entrepreneurship, everything is scaled down, so don’t overcomplicate the decision-making and keep it simple. The important factor at this stage is to keep moving so you can get to your launch pad to buckle up for blastoff.
