One thing that always makes me laugh is when technical knowledge clashes with real-world outcomes.
It definitely happens when you take academic study and try to build a company accordingly. But it can be shocking when you take real-world expertise and try to build a company on past experiences.
Sure...some things are timeless. Structured hiring processes. Customer-focused, product-led companies tend to do better with recurring revenue generation models.
However, there are other things that should be timeless, but by participating in an experience-based echo chamber you will likely fail.
Case in point. If you were great at lead generation via LinkedIn, you likely won’t be very good at lead generation on YouTube if you use the same tactics. It just won’t work (and the platform is designed to exploit the same tactics).
You can take beliefs and convictions from LinkedIn to inform your tactics on Another platform. Copy and pasting won’t work though.
When that happens you have to develop new hypotheses and strategies and test them against the real world. Doubling down and removing excess when necessary.
I call this process building with brute force. You know that you high-level beliefs and assumptions are correct, but your strategies and tactics are missing the mark. This is why the Lean Startup model tends to work in most industries. It’s also why growth hacking become a “thing”.
The faster you can test your beliefs against real-world scenarios, the faster you can make/deliver a process/experience that your ideal customers truly want.
There is no room for pity. You’re building something from nothing and need to be ready for lots of micro-failures to attain macro-success.
In recognizing this you have to be ready to throw a lot of ideas in the proverbial trash can and head back to the drawing board.