Showing posts with label lean startup strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lean startup strategy. Show all posts

The Cost of a Mistake

We all make mistakes in life. Making a mistake is part and parcel of life. Be it in personal or professional life, we make a lot of wrong decisions which cost us in some way or the other. So if this is true, how should you minimize the loss suffered by you due to these mistakes?

Every mistake has a cost. So we should look at minimizing this cost. The cost of making a mistake rises exponentially with time. The longer you keep making a mistake, the more it will hurt you.

cost of mistakes

This is the exact philosophy behind what we say ‘Going Lean’. Keep assessing your actions so that you can figure out quickly when you have made a mistake. Making the same mistake for long can seriously affect some part of your life. In your business, a long duration mistake will have accelerated actual and opportunity costs attached to it. In personal relationships, the longer the mistake, the bigger the dent it leaves. The same goes for any addiction as well. The longer you are addicted to anything harmful, the effects keep on getting accelerated over time.

Making mistakes is not wrong. Making them for very long is!

Startup Hack – Test before you Leap

minimum viable product

Building a MVP or getting a basic message to your potential target market and getting some feedback can save a startup a lot of money, time and effort. Committing to an idea based on one’s own mindset and understanding is not a smart thing to do.

A lot of big startups we see today have done this in their early days.

Groupon – Andrew Mason initially sold T-shirts of a single size on a wordpress blog to test the concept.

Dropbox – Drew Houston put together a small demo and showcased it to potential customers to get feedback.

Zappos – Nick Swinmurn tool photographs of shoes and put them online to see if people were actually ready and willing to buy them from there.