Who Cares About Your Startup? Right Now, It’s Only You Baby

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It can be a lonely world out there. During the first days and weeks when you are just starting a new business, it can feel like you are alone in the wilderness.

When consulting with entrepreneurs that are struggling to get a business off the ground, I often end up telling them this:

I read a great book on starting your own business. It’s the most important book on the subject you could ever read—and it only had two words in it.

Those two words were “nobody cares.”

To close the story and make the point, I tell them that as an entrepreneur, your entire job is to make those two tiny, awful words wrong.

That’s it. Make people care about what you are doing.

The fact of the matter is that at first, people won’t care. People are busy. People won’t know who you are when you start out, and they won’t go out of their way to find out. As you create a business, and move beyond your product to the point where you are figuring out how to connect your product with the market, you realize that the whole purpose behind your effort is to get people to care about what you do. If you are in the computer business, it is not just about computers. If you are in the pizza business, it is not just about pizza. The best product in the world is just a starting point, and it won’t make you a dollar unless you can figure out how to make that product relevant to the lives of your customers and get them to under­stand that relevance. Having a great product helps, but that alone is not enough.

This bias toward customer indifference is a reality of the market. But to tell you the truth, I like the fact that getting into markets is tough, because that means that it is tough for my competitors too, and will serve to keep the folks in your market that aren’t smart enough or fast enough from hogging the swing set for too long.