My sister recently started her own business – selling beautiful, handmade, refillable candles.
I'm incredibly proud of her achievements so far, and I can't wait to see where her business goes next.
The whole process has been a huge learning curve for me though – having run GoSquared for so many years, it's refreshing to see a business from inception again.
One key misperception I see with founders just starting out, is that they hold too much back for too long – they wait until everything's perfect before sharing their creation with the world. They believe there will be a sudden influx of customers that will buy their perfect product the moment they launch.
Even for established businesses, having a queue of willing customers is a challenge – for a fresh new enterprise, it's as good as impossible.
Don't hope or even plan for the flood of customers. Time spent planning for that is time you could spend elsewhere.
Stop perfecting.
Just sell one thing to one customer.
Then do it again.
And then again.
You have to start one by one. You'll learn a lot this way, and you'll be making progress each and every day.
If you can sell one candle, you can sell two. And if you can sell two you can sell many, many more.