Get the Starting Line Behind You

Talking about your idea is not the same as making it.

Once Upon a Pitch Problem #16

“I can’t even make it to the starting line! Well done!” gleefully cheered the race volunteer as she handed my retrieved kit bag to me. I laughed and thanked her, as I rummaged around for my beanie and recovery drink. Weaving through the supporters and racers in the finish area, bathed in positive energy and suffering bodily agony, I thought about what the volunteer just said about ‘making it’ to the starting line. Months of training and sacrifice, gear failures, work commitments, blisters, a permanently upset stomach, runs in morning darkness, chaffing plus always battling a million excuses why, today, I just couldn’t run and none of that would have mattered if I didn’t toe the line and race: a metaphor for the classic founder and startup problem of perpetual planning that never launches.

Solutions

1. Know your strengths. Not everyone was born to start a business. It might not be your purpose, your why. Innovators and strategists envision and plan. Operators execute those plans. If you are constantly approaching the starting line and never actually starting, never making that minimum viable product, never getting that demo into customer testing, never attacking that first market, you aren’t going to make it to the starting line. While you are revising memos, tweaking decks, changing colors on your website, other runners are finished and new runners are starting. Knowing your strengths means knowing when you need help. License your idea to market operators or find an operator to join you as a co-founder in the business. Get the starting line behind you.

2. “Once upon a time . . ..” The story you pitch yourself is the most important story. Striving for greatness is the responsibility of each of us, to discover, develop, and bring the best of our talents and skills to solving humanity’s problems. Every decision you make tells your story. Tell yourself the true story that belongs to you, not what your family, teachers, mate, media, the past, or bosses told you was your story. If you told yourself a story that you are an entrepreneur or a founder and yet, you do not have customers because you never made the product, then what really is your story? Great stories transform heroes through challenges and obstacles. Ask yourself whether you can make that founder story true by getting that product into a customer’s hands or whether you have been transformed and are now ready for a new, true story about yourself.

3. One runner, hundreds of millions of helpers. We mythologize the billionaire founder to absurd singular hero worship. Elon Musk is not SpaceX, nor is Jeff Bezos Amazon. The employees, customers, partners, funders, advisors, and vendors who made these founder’s ideas come to life are collectively the hero. One runner does not finish alone; hundreds of millions of shoe and apparel designers and manufacturers, nutrition chemists, athletic coaches and trainers, race safety and security experts, watch electronics manufacturers, and more, put that runner over the finish line. If you aren’t a runner, don’t run and don’t talk yourself into running. Innovation needs everyone to apply the best and highest use of their unique talents to bring new ideas into the world. Be the best materials scientist or embedded software engineer or compression sock designer; be that hero.

   What They Said

Always with you, it cannot be done . . . You must unlearn what you have learned . . . Do or do not. There is no try. - Yoda, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

See You on the Track

Rafferty Jackson

Author The First Principles Pitch, startup storyteller, board member, advisor and investor. Once Upon a Pitch is a weekly newsletter looking at one business pitch problem and offering storytelling solutions to help solve that problem. On Demand startup pitch and business coaching now available for May 2023 at Jack Industries.