Get all the good advice you can, but beware of bad adviceby Derek Lidow In this week’s newsletter we focus on how to spot and avoid bad startup advice. Next week we’ll describe where to seek and get advice you can trust, considering that there is so much advice available. Since there is virtually an unlimited amount of startup advice out there, you need to be able to filter out bad advice as a first step in getting to the advice you can trust to help you. Here’s what we mean by bad advice: #1 Advice based upon a single individual’s entrepreneurial experience could lead to you making a bad decision.Much of the startup advice on the internet is based upon some entrepreneur’s personal experience, which will always be described as leading to a successful outcome. Just because somebody is perceived as successful does not mean that copying what they did will make you successful. Matter of fact, copying what another entrepreneur did will almost certainly not be good for you because your situation is different, as are your skills, traits, resources, and your social networks. Your motivations, which includes your values, may be different too. No entrepreneurial success story has ever been reproduced, not even close. As we will discuss next week, good generic advice that is broadly applicable does exist, just not in the form of someone’s memoir that is deemed gospel. #2 Advice given personally to you, by any person or organization (or AI) that does not know your situation well, is suspect.You can contact many people, successful entrepreneurs included, and organizations to ask for their advice. And many people and organizations will respond; even more will respond today because AIs and bots make that much easier. Determining the best next step in anyone’s entrepreneurial journey is always personal and complicated. A poorly targeted or executed next step depletes resources and adds risk. Without first spending the time to get to know an individual and understand their context, any advice is suspect. As someone’s entrepreneurial journey proceeds, determining the best next step gets more complicated and it will take an outsider more and more time to get a full understanding of the context and options. As we will discuss next week, this means you want to seek out good advice and advisors early in your journey. #3 Advice given based upon theory and not experience is risky and you shouldn’t be an experimental subject.Much of the advice you can find will come with a narrative about why it is good and why the advisor is wise, but a good story doesn’t mean it has ever actually happened. This means that some academic advice you may come upon is based upon theory and not experience, so it is suspect. If somebody tells you that this is how you can succeed at a certain task, make sure it is not theory but it is based upon a set of facts and analysis vetted by responsible third parties. In the academic world, this means the insights should derive from peer reviewed studies and publications. #4 Advice you have to pay for when you have NOT been given a compelling free demonstration of its potential to get you more customers, help you scale up, or reduce your costs.Even with such a demonstration, you need to actually check the references of anyone you may want to pay to give you advice. Talk to former clients who were not on the list of references by finding names and contacts of former or existing employees on LinkedIn. Never take their word for it. Furthermore, any advisor you pay should be available to you almost 24/7 should you have any concerns, questions or specific problems that delay the successful implementation of their advice. Without a free demonstration and you verifying their claims through private discussions of their past results at former clients, and without assurances of 24/7 support, paid advice will likely be bad advice. #5 AI advice as a partner or as your startup advisor or coach is currently very bad. Unfortunately, as we have mentioned previously in our newsletter, AI has been trained on much of the bad entrepreneurship advice floating around on the internet. It also has been trained to give advice as if you were going to be the next Elon Musk, which is a terrible assumption to make about any entrepreneur. Even with all this bad entrepreneurship advice floating around, there is still plenty of good advice to be found. We will discuss how and where to find it next week. With gratitude, Derek and Ben P.S. If you like what we’re doing, please consider recommending this newsletter to another person you think would benefit from us. It really helps us build out our free content platform.
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