Improve the World to reap the World 🌎

The equation of entrepreneurship.

Simply put, entrepreneurship is the willingness to try to solve problems. It's the willingness to ask, "how can I solve X, for people Y, so that they can experience Z?". The difficult part, is figuring out which combinations of X, Y and Z work together.

X: Scratching an Itch

Improving the world doesn't necessarily start with the world. Inspiration can lie right in front of you. You can start by improving your world.

Scratching your own itch can be the most motivating and efficient approach to building a venture.

This is exactly what has driven the development of Protolyst over the past two years. Myself and my team started with a problem: time consuming, tedious and difficult processes to keep track of our team's market research. Our notes were scattered across dropbox folders and excel spreadsheets and important knowledge was being lost, forgotten and untapped. We'd found our X.

Y: Through People, Find the Solution

We found scratching our own itch to be the perfect stepping to stone to discovering our target customer, our Y.

When we asked, "who else can we solve this problem for?", the easy answer was 'people like us': our colleagues, our communities, our friends. Entrepreneurs, researchers and knowledge management geeks.

Building for people with whom you already speak on a regular basis, face similar problems to and have aligned needs with, will make the journey of identifying your ideal customer less forced and more organic.

Experiencing a problem for yourself doesn't mean to say that solving the entrepreneurial equation will be easy. Building a business requires understanding your customers better than most. A strong understanding of your customers requires you talk to people and iterate a solution with them as you go on your journey.

This community-based mindset and process shortens the feedback loop and accelerates you to a more effective solution to the problem you're trying to solve.

Z: The Secret Sauce

Understanding the problem you are trying to solve, and who for, is enough to complete the entrepreneurial equation. But I believe this is where we often fall short. Seeing the whole picture of why you are solving problem X for Customer Y is critical to finding your place in the market.

We need to focus on the Z.

An example: it's universally acknowledged that the Sun can be damaging to our skin (X). We all need to wear sunscreen from time to time (Y). For some, this may be so they can look good on a sun lounger (Z1). For others, so they can keep their eye on the ball in the middle of a summer sport (Z2). The needs of each of these customers opens new opportunities for innovation; an opportunity to use a different secret sauce. Tinted sunscreen? Sweat-proof sunscreen?

Having a strong sense of why people struggle with a problem and what it is they feel they need to overcome it, can give us a clearer target to aim for when building a solution and positioning our brand.

By keeping your Z firmly in sight, with each new feature, sales call and tweet, you'll be increasing your chances to move closer to product market fit.

Reap the rewards

When written out as a formula, the entrepreneurial equations looks like so:

X + Y = Z²

Why Z²?

We all know that success as an entrepreneur can take patience, sacrifice and risk. But if our methods and motives are founded upon the entrepreneurial equation (not just $$$), we too will ultimately reap the rewards:

• The confidence to experiment and build solutions to problems
• The communities that are so enriching (shout out to IH 👋)
• The opportunity to learn both deeply and broadly
• The opportunity to lead others
• The ability to communicate, often with complete strangers
• The satisfaction of helping those who you meet on your journey

Ultimately, I believe the mindset of a founder should be to:

1. Try to improve the world.
2. Try improve themselves.

If we're lucky we might earn a bit of pocket money whilst we're at it!

What motivates you on your entrepreneurial journey? Let me know!