Aurore Belfrage from YourMiddleEast is a serial entrepreneur who, as any entrepreneur should, has failed several times and learnt from her mistakes. She gives us the opportunity to avoid making the same ones while reminding us that “Failure is not the opposite of success, it is part of it”. It is in fact a natural part of the process of entrepreneurship. Here is what she shared with a room of entrepreneurs at Startup Istanbul 2015.
Building a business is hard work, it’s lonely and scary. If you want to make the journey more enjoyable you better surround yourself with other crazy people. The mindset is the first step and a very important part in the process of creation. Even before launching Wrapp, Aurore Belfrage and her team called themselves entrepreneurs. They decided they were people who have the ability to be creative and build a company. This mental decision freed their minds and gave them the ability to actually create a business. Remember that you also have the possibility to make this decision for yourself.
What mistakes did Aurore make and what can we learn from them?
“We built the wrong product, we priced it incorrectly, we sold it to the wrong people, we went to the wrong market”. When Wrapp got cloned and the competitor got ready really fast to launch in 19 markets the team of Wrapp got scared of its impressive execution and feared losing the advantage of the first-to-market so they changed their strategy. Wrapp’s original plan was to test in Sweden first and then internashiptionalize. They changed that to launch in 8 markets and lost focus. Big mistake.
“If you don’t build your dream someone will hire you to build theirs”
Everyone is a potential client, have everyone try your product and listen to what they have to say while testing and afterwards. It’s ok to be obsessive and annoying. Sell the problem you are solving, not the product. What pain are you solving? Understand your user but also your client. How does your client talk? What’s the pain for them on a practical and operational level? Use their lingo. If you don’t know prep on a friend who could be a client. Make sure your idea is applicable to their business and find a way to make it understandable to them. Here is the full session [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0LtnJnKYC0[/embed]]]>