Nick Huber wrote a piece on analysis paralysis that I keep coming back to. His argument is that most people who say they want to run a business never get out of the research phase. Here are the points that stuck with me.
Six months or move on
- Unless you are already rich, a business should be profitable inside six months.
- If it is not, and the model has no realistic path there, walk away and try something else.
- Time is the thing you cannot get back, so a slow business is an expensive one.
The idea matters far less than you think
- Execution is where businesses are won or lost.
- Hiring, selling, delegating, logistics, answering the phone. The unglamorous stuff.
- None of it shows up in a business plan and all of it decides whether you make money.
Fire more, aim less
- Huber’s version of how successful people operate: aim, fire, aim, fire, fire, fire, then work out what happened.
- The failure mode is aiming forever and never pulling the trigger.
- A miss teaches you something. Endless preparation teaches you nothing.
Why waiting costs you
- Opportunities are windows and they close.
- Your competitors are moving while you are still reading.
- Cold feet feel like caution. Mostly it is just fear wearing a suit.
I have watched plenty of people research an idea for months, build the website, order the shirts, then talk themselves out of it and start again on something else. The extra research never saved them. The ones who get somewhere start badly and fix it as they go.
Worth a read if any of this sounds familiar: Nick Huber’s Sweaty Startup.
