Spielberg Cursed Entrepreneurs

Spielberg cursed us with his magic and story-telling. I'm not talking about Disclosure. I'm talking about 1989 - his Field of Dreams movie. The whole thing is predicated on one, central, romantic approach to life: get inspired, build the thing, and you'll have people clamouring to use it.

This is actually kind of true - or true under certain circumstances (that SaaS idea that really lends itself to building in public, or posting on X). But this, again, a certain, specific type of product. And besides, PIB is marketing.

The sad thing is to toil in isolation for months or years to bring an idea to bear, only to hear crickets. Or to spend 20k on a build, not knowing if it'll work.

This is what we get for 'if you build it, they will come.' That, somehow, your creation will just generate a sort of gravity, and you'll get buyers, and scale to millions.

This also applies to service companies building an in-house solution, hoping to re-sell it. This is possible, and does happen with success on some occasions, but it's mere luck without a specific strategy.

This was my issue for years. Years! I even had a wise business consultant/coach tell me about the Lean Canvas. She had me write out the problem I was solving, the solution, key metrics, the unique value proposition. But back then, none of it landed for me. She was showing me the tip of the spear - the idea that your product or service idea is a hypothesis, and that there is an established way of treating it as such.

This has so many ramifications. Too many of us have gotten bit by the entrepreneurial bug, to have built it for months, or maybe years. The emotional momentum of the work means that to back up and think of your built solution as a hypothesis is...almost impossible. Many of us have gotten investors - friends and family, businesses or business peers - and are now saddled with obligations to these people, having never paused to think that the idea they built or are building is...a hypothesis.

To make matters worse, there really are many cases of coming up with an idea, implementing it, and somehow catching traction. These cases are extremely rare, but by virtue of their anomalous success, they signal to us that "if you build it, they will come" is the approach, rather than just being an anomaly.

The missing piece is to "get out of the building" (or pick up the phone). Talk to your target market. See what ails them. And build from there.

This relates very closely to incrementalism, which, when done correctly, effectively resembles agile.