On a new venture timeline, the last thing you need is to be confused. We were not clear about what problem we were trying to solve or what our target market was. Was it content generation, technology, process outsourcing, continuing professional education, individual development needs, or corporate training programs? In the long run we wanted to solve all of these. In the short run we should have focused on one, developed a reasonable solution, hit revenue milestones, and then moved on to the next big problem.
In our infinite wisdom we jumped from one problem to the next in search of perfection, thinking that we couldn’t talk to customers until we had an absolutely polished product that would blow them away. We jumped around fromone milestone to the next, incorporating feedback, suggestions, ideas, and new concepts without monetizing the value of the work done on previous editions of problems that we had already solved.