Don't start your business like Charlotte's streetcar to nowhere

Charlotte streetcar tracks with no streetcars using them

For whatever reason, it's seems like the last few months have found me a lot on Elizabeth Avenue here in Charlotte. This is probably why the Charlotte streetcar project has been on my mind lately. Sometime in the last 10 years somebody believed it would be a good idea to re-introduce streetcars back into the Charlotte transportation scene. Not in and of itself a bad idea. So the first bit of construction they did was to lay tracks, not at the start of the tracks, but at the end of one of the first phases on Elizabeth Avenue. I don't know the details, but the city removed funding or lost funding for the project so nothing more is being done. So this half mile stretch of tracks sits completed and dormant, not at the beginning of the line, but in the middle of the proposed line. Sitting there, day after day, month after month, year after year not being used.

I've been out working on my current consulting business (Torrent Consulting) for almost a year now and I've had a steady stream of people emailing me and calling me to talk about their business ideas. It's becoming pretty common place for me, and my business partner Phil Brabbs, to sit down with people to discuss their business or next idea. It's something we love to do, always looking to see how we can help someone along in their journey.

One of the things we've found is that a lot of people don't know where to start or what to focus on in their new business, so they go to the place where it is easiest or where they enjoy working the most. In other words, they lay their tracks in the middle of nowhere, not at the center of their business to build out from there. They may get excited about their idea or business and spend months building a web site or thousands of dollars trying to perfect a product that's never even sold to one person. They may spend 6 months building a business plan without ever talking to any potential customers or without having a real product or service that they've actually sold. Most of these ideas never get off of the ground or scale to anything more than a glorified hobby.

We've leveraged some ideas from the book Lean Startup by Eric Ries and customer development principles from Steve Blank's writings to push people to focus on their MVP, or Minimum Viable Product. What is the most minimum product or service you could deliver to your customer in order to get started? For example, could you just build 1 mile of tracks starting at the center of the city and run the streetcar along that stretch to see if it gets used and deserves funding the rest of the project? Could you just start baking pastries out of your house and start selling to friends to test your idea before you sink $100K into starting your own bakery?

In other words, start small and focus on the customer needs, trying to solve that problem in the most minimal way, which usually is the most inexpensive way to launch your idea. This will keep you much more intentional on listening to your customer and determining exactly what their needs are so your product can meet them. It will allow you to really quickly test your product and see if you are really meeting the needs of your customers.

The alternative to this is spending a lot of time and money laying tracks on a road that may never get used.