Brewed From Within

First in Line

There’s something special about being first in line.

Being up front means you’re committed. You’ve made a sacrifice to ensure you experience something you care about in style. Conquering the unknowns to secure this coveted spot has required effort, but a sense of pride materializes when everything goes to plan.

When we think about being first through the lens of innovation, first in line is not such a desired position.

Being first gives entrepreneurs a chance to take an early lead, but early leaders don’t always win in the end. The headwind is strongest when you’re in front.

When you’re creating something new, enthusiasm from early adopters is often met with pernicious friction. One common source of friction is the time spent educating a prevailing market. This protracted process wears on even the most resilient and exhausts resources every step of the way. Along with frictions that come with being first, with fewer clues from the past it’s harder to avoid potential pitfalls as well.

There’s value in a head start, but the early market leader often falls behind the innovation curve. Never hesitate to forge into the unknown, but remember that when you lead, others will always be chasing you.

If you’re building in front, stay ahead with humility, a challenge network that invites you to be wrong by avoiding groupthink, a genuine desire to accelerate others, and interactive leadership that allows intrapreneurs to stay wild.

If you’re the one chasing, which is far more common, you’ll need to flex a bit of founder-market fit to find product-market fit, but it’s nice knowing there’s an existing path with potentially more opportunities to champion change in a known industry.

Alright, now think bigger. How might we avoid the wait? The front of any line may be a traditional way of getting ahead, but this requires time with no guarantees. You’re still relying on someone else to let you in as well. If this activity is something you really enjoy, be conscious of how business can sometimes kill your passion but know there’s usually a way to be less of a spectator by getting more involved.

One way to do this is by combining your creative skills and an entrepreneurial spirit to wedge yourself into the experience itself. This requires initiative, but volunteering, building into a side hustle, or using content creation skills can quickly become your ticket to skip the line all together.

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A love for friends, craft beer, and technology is what led to FliteBrite. Along with a patented electronic serving system, our beer festival app is a tasty example of how we now skip past lines like this. Cheers!

By Ben McDougal, ago

Early Moves

The term early moves is abstract on purpose. It can mean so many different things in entrepreneurship. Early moves are actions that brew progress. Initiative is rewarded with positive energy infused into moments that help us climb the mountain toward momentum.

The term early moves is used throughout this book. To get thinking, sharpen the sword with these tactical examples of early moves that keep leaders building:

listen
be honest
read a book
explore current markets
attend local community events
participate at hackathons
connect others
practice the pitch
discover resources
form the company
organize accounting
compete in pitch events
seek accountability
travel to learn
mentorship
create
do

Early moves are exhilarating, but there’s value in being efficient as you decide if something is going to work. When we say yes to something, we say no to something else. It’s tempting to say, “Let’s gooo,” but this is opportunity cost. Be strategic with early moves. As you build, collect feedback like a scientist. Use feedback as data, because an early and proper no is much better than a long, wrong yes.

To avoid swinging at a bad pitch, take time alone. Along with your experience and honest thoughts, the internet is too powerful not to research online. Don’t hope something doesn’t exist; try to find it. Run some numbers. Talk with people to begin customer discovery. Think about ways to prototype something worth testing. Practice storytelling and see if you can snag a pre-order. Will strangers buy in?

If enthusiasm remains genuine, talk with others who may be interested in collaborating. Think about your own real skills to identify where you’ll need help. Attend related events to further qualify early concepts. Even if you’re not ready to share details, the readiness to show up often links to new allies who can connect dots. Stay organized and see how it feels to create and post content online as you continue working through the early stages of any idea maze.

Before you go much further, take a pit stop with your future self. Is this a quest and environment you want to work in for the foreseeable future? Perhaps this should remain a hobby? For instance, if you like pinball, it doesn’t mean you should start a pinball business. The hardships that come with being a business owner can compress, divert, and decrease passion. At first, the allure of new-made things is fun and exciting, but pressures add up. If the dance remains motivating, positive tension is relieved by executing early moves that help sustain a sensation of growth.

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“Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately.” –Naval Ravikant

Determining which actions to take when is a juggling act, but as early moves are blended and strategically sequenced, they collide to jolt a business idea forward. 

You Don’t Need This Book: Entrepreneurship in the Connected Era prompts diverse types of early moves that guide an idea toward commercialization. Here’s a reminder of that book’s table of contents for readers to revisit.

You Don't Need This Book: Entrepreneurship In The Connected EraChapter 1 – Ideation
Chapter 2 – Community
Chapter 3 – Team
Chapter 4 – Side Hustles
Chapter 5 – Research
Chapter 6 – Testing
Chapter 7 – Marketing
Chapter 8 – Sales
Chapter 9 – Results
Chapter 10 – Persistence

If this evolving business idea continues to touch your heart after internal and external analysis, you may have something ready to pursue. Yes!

Inspiration is perishable, so when this happens, be ready to take action. It’s not how fast you move; it’s that you find ways to get started and keep moving.

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Things you dedicate time to will grow.

As you make early moves, stay nimble. Agility is one of the best advantages to being small. It often takes many versions to land on something ready for the wild. Remain sustained by timing early moves based on personal bandwidth, the environment, things you do well, and things that make you uncomfortable. Leverage educational support, accelerator programs, and resources. Stay intellectually humble, work with others, and continue executing more early moves.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Slow & Fast

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. This sounds like a contranym, but when we slow down, it’s easier to find a rhythm that activates kinematics to add elegant speed.

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Accuracy sparkles within rhythm.

This concept serves founders who are building with a turbulent sense of urgency. For example, startup life in an accelerator is a compressed environment for ideas to flourish. When mentors and investors are dedicated to helping founders succeed, milestones will be achieved, but growing too fast can leave the team feeling hollow.

With decisions at every turn, relationships still take time. Early hires are delicate. Financial modeling is complicated. Sometimes the product isn’t even fully baked. This is when slowness adds a healthy thickness. Patience leads to deeper understanding, which bonds to the urgency. Momentum is not only then accelerated; it’s also geared to scale.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Pain Relievers vs. Vitamins

In agony, we reach for pain relievers made to kill the torment. When everything feels normal, we may pop vitamins to support a healthy lifestyle, but missing a day is not a problem. For every vitamin, the medicine cabinet has just as many intentions collecting dust.

As we study a team/product/service, is true pain for real customers being relieved, or it a nice-to-have idea that may (or may not) provide unquestioned value?

When people like the idea but hesitate to buy, you have a vitamin. If you always have to explain why someone needs it, you have a vitamin. If it’s unclear what you have, you have a vitamin. Pain killers are easy to spot. They sell as fast as supply can keep up with demand.

Ongoing customer discovery keeps a pulse on demand and helps us build with product-market fit. As we ease true pain, stories that sell (marketing) should highlight the results that target customers desire without question. Forget the jargon, impressive features, and pretending to be passionate. Lean into the pain.

By Ben McDougal, ago

#1 DAD

Startups that pay in love are a blank
canvas that comes to life through us.

By nature, parents want to provide the means for children to go beyond their potential. Family requires immeasurable resources, but the love from our kids unlocks more hours in the day. The added productivity comes from seeing the best of ourselves in someone we care so much about. Purpose is renewed and the heart we put into our creative work can make our presence as parents even more interesting.

Summon Stories

Children grow up fast, so we stay in the moment. Everyone tells us to cherish the simple joys of life, but it may be worth getting a little extra creative. One way to enhance your family’s ability to relive memorable moments, is by using multimedia marketing skills to summon family stories.

Every moment is special. As creation becomes second nature, handpicked memories can be stitched together to revisit interactively, any time, with or without you.

Most of us have an endless collection of photos and video on our smartphone, but scrolling around on a digital device doesn’t translate into something a group can enjoy together. It’s easy for good things to get lost in so much noise and spoken storytelling is always merry too, but why not paint more stories with a few added brushes?

Quiet relics like photo slideshows, something printed that sits beautifully on the shelf, a mix of audio recordings, art on the wall, or a cinematic feature film that highlights your adventures. You’re the creator with endless ways to create.

We all do a form of this, because family is our favorite, but the time required is real. A rigid cadence is not required, since any day is a good day to ship this type of of art. In the early days of photos and video, it was only birthdays and Christmas — now everyday is a holiday. No need to rush, but keep producing new surprises. Everyone will love the end result and as more come together, the growing playlist becomes a sequence of stories that follow kids growing up. With our constant collection of content, a good story is always ready to tell, but at a minimum, why not share an annual gift with your kids, partner, and other loved ones?

Along the way, attentive and controlled organization will make a growing collection of relics easier to craft. This takes an ongoing commitment, but file management is easy and helps bring life to life with shared memories.

Your future self will then thank you for an effort to organize this heartfelt content. Share in public if you want, but that can alter the art if it becomes a show. Do it for yourself and your favorite people first. Organize what will be a massive library offline, then, if you want play with the transitory channels of social media, that’s a personal choice.

No matter who resists whatever it may be, time compiling legacy projects will rarely feel wasted. It’s using our real skills to commemorate those we love. Scanned memories may give us content without capturing it in the future. For now, it’s up to us to trap time for personal storytelling.

Compensation is not money, but this does enhance your content creation skills for other areas in life. Technology also makes editing content more productive, but this is not your average task. This is the type of sincere storytelling you enjoy spending time with.

As kids grow up, these projects will have the lowest view counts, but always be your very favorite. Looking ahead, it’s crazy to imagine being a child right now, then receiving such a gift from my parents someday!

You’ve Got Mail

Consider setting up an email for your little one. This inbox can be used as a communication channel to write to your child as they grow up. Whether you start writing before they are born or later in their life, imagine what a gift this inbox will be in the future! This email address can be shared with family and used for online accounts if you want, but at a minimum, this curates a personalized time machine full of thoughtful updates.

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What’s your favorite parenting tip? Share it as a comment or hit me up!

Along with sentimental content, your kids will appreciate an email address that can be used after childhood. First and last name with your preferred email provider should stand the test of time. This is also a good chance to register a URL using their first and last name. This can connect to their email or support a personal website someday.

Avoid Routine

“Time flies” and “they grow up so fast” is accurate, but avoiding routine may slow down time.

The freedom to be spontaneous is a privilege and everyone will define such flexibility differently, but a proven path to explore such a reality is entrepreneurship. Boundless hard work, dedication, and resiliency are what this lifestyle takes, but suffering provides a stronger sense of purpose.

As this purpose is layered in later stages of life, experiential wisdom can be channeled into more treasured time doing things that make us happy. While hardship is part of the deal, children make their parents happy. Perhaps a reward for parents who lead by example, is the opportunity to share everything with those who matter most.

By Ben McDougal, ago