Being an entrepreneur means learning how to know when you’re wrong and doing it quickly

When people ask me why we didn’t take venture capital to fund Work It, Mom! I give two reasons, both very different:

1. Part of my motivation to leave a career in venture capital was to see my daughter for more than 20 minutes a day and have some semblance of a life. I’ve invested in venture-backed companies and I think I have a sense of what it’s like to run one. At this point in my life, it’s not what I want to be doing.

2. I launched Work It, Mom! because I believe that the 30 million working moms in the US need an online community and resource dedicated just to them. But I don’t know if this means that we can actually turn this into a business. Do working moms have enough time to spend online and be involved in a community? Can our niche audience be big enough to attract solid advertising revenue? We don’t have answers to these questions and we can’t have answers until we run with this for a while and figure out if the business plan works. I don’t want to spend venture money chasing the wrong plan–a million dollars spent on marketing the wrong product is a waste of money.

I’ve gotten a lot of compliments for reason #2. People tell me that it’s “very sober and responsible thinking” and that they are impressed that someone with venture capital connections chooses to bootstrap the company and face the many difficulties that come with that choice (not nearly enough resources, no marketing budget, huge personal financial pressure, you know what they are.) But to me it’s the most obvious one.

And I was glad to read this post by Fred Wilson talking about failures and successes in his portfolio. What he has observed is that 2/3 of the companies in his various portfolios have partially or completely transformed their business plans in their course of their life and most of the successful ones did. Being a successful entrepreneur does not mean having the greatest idea ever that gains traction as soon as you launch it (which would be nice, by the way.) It means trying different directions and figuring out quickly which one is the winning one, without spending tons of capital in the process.

I find this perspective helpful, and the fact that it’s based on data reassuring. I don’t know if Work It, Mom! can be a huge business success–it’s so young and it’s so early to make predictions–but I gain some comfort in knowing that by bootstrapping it while we figure out IF our business plan can be successful we’re doing what has helped some other successful companies become such.