Erik: What are the stages of the entrepreneurial journey?
Bijoy: So far I’ve identified six stages, six basic stages of the journey.
It starts with the ‘you’ stage where the entrepreneur is really working on themselves,
and they aren’t an entrepreneur, they’re just a person in the world, and not just a
person, they are any person in the world.
And they’re developing themselves.
And that really happens from the time you are born until, you know, ongoing.
And then there’s the quest – the ‘question’ stage, the ‘question’.
The reason I call it the ‘question’ stage is because what I’ve uncovered is that all
the great entrepreneurial journeys are – the quest is actually rooted in a question.
So what happens is that the person gets acquainted with their question.
Everyone has a unique question.
You can ask that question in lots of different ways, but ultimately you’ll find there’s
a unique question that’s guiding it.
And then they say ‘yes’ to that question.
So they’d go on a question, you know, instead of going on a quest.
And that’s really the beginning of the internal journey.
So if the ‘you’ stage is the beginning of your journey of skills and capabilities,
talents, and so on, and so forth, what you do in the world, the ‘question’ stage
is the beginning of an internal dialogue with yourself, about your relationship to the world,
and to the universe, and so on, and so forth.
And so that ‘question’ stage is all about deciding to go on the journey.
Luke Skywalker going ‘okay, my parents are dead, I’m gonna go with Obi-Wan.’
Then, there’s the ‘ideation’ stage.
The ‘ideation’ stage is – now that I’ve got my talents and passions, I’ve got – I’m
armed with my question, I’m gonna produce something that the world needs, or that maybe
my answer to my question, that pleases me, then hopefully other people will be able to
enjoy.
So you make your first version of that product.
It’s the birth of the product, or service, or cause, or experience, or community, whatever
it is you’re making, and that continues.
Then you enter the ‘valley of death’ stage, and the ‘valley of death’ stage is the
death of many things including the entrepreneur’s, maybe, false ego, but also potentially the
death of the venture because you’ve gotta now go find a customer who will actually buy
your product, in some way exchange value with you for it.
So the key action is ‘sell’ and you’ll release the birth of the customer.
And you take all these things that, again, each of these things is additive.
It’s – the best analogy I found is it’s a fugue, different lines of music, different
melodies, each their own line, and as you add layer upon layer, upon layer of music,
it has to still sound beautiful, and that’s a challenge.
As you layer it, you might organize a line that’s all sounding good.
You add a new element and it, you know, it messes up the first line, so you gotta go
back and tweak that, and all of a sudden, oh good, now you can add a third.
So as you’re adding these lines to the fugue, you’re progressing in the stages.
And sometimes, if a line can’t kind of work, it collapses back down, you go backwards in
the stage.
And it’s not backwards, it’s just you’re going to – you’re going back to a stage
that you maybe didn’t quite truly conquer or truly solve.
So then the ‘valley of death’, and then you get at the ‘growth’ stage.
You get to sustainability, and then you can decide what you wanna do in terms of growing
fast, or maintaining – yeah, you might decide you enjoy being a 5 person company and that’s
what you wanna do, but essentially, the ‘growth’ stage is the emergence of the business model.
Essentially all these lines of the fugue lining up or your business model, and now you scale
it, you systematize it.
What was your founding team now becomes your culture.
What was that inner journey becomes your mission or your question.
What was your product – you know, you see all these elements all come together, and
now you kind of have to scale, do it at some kind of scale.
So that’s – those are the core stages.
And then, of course, there’s a ‘re-bootstrap’ stage, which is that nothing ever lasts forever.
Everything needs to be tweaked.
The universe is always moving.
So business models have a lifespan, it turns out, and companies and organizations have
to continually find a way to reinvent and do that process over and over again so that
they can kind of meeting the, you know, the new – the new demands of the world.
I mean Apple right now is the greatest example of a company that has been re-bootstrap by
its founder to create entirely new business models for it.