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My name is Nick Manzoni and I am the Founder of SportsLab360, a Basketball IQ platform.
I embarked on my journey to become an entrepreneur back in 2016 when I was entering my senior year at Drake University. Here are the top 3 lessons I learned along the way:
1) DIVE IN!
This is the most valuable piece of advice I can share, and it’s not even close.
Pretend you are me, an overzealous college student with a dream to build a successful company; specifically, an app that helps players learn the game of basketball and make better decisions on the court. Of course, you want to build the best possible product before unveiling a finished product to the world.
Guess what? You’ll be lucky if 0.1% of the world sees it within the first year. So, don’t be afraid to put out something that maybe isn’t perfect! The best thing you can do is put your MVP (minimum viable product) out there, and then open up your ears to the praises and the complaints of your users. And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with giving an incomplete product out for free or at a discount at the beginning.
The same “Dive in!” logic goes for tasks and roadblocks along the way. How often have you had something on your “to-do” list that lingers on there because there is some unknown element to it? With the resources we have in the modern day like a simple Google Search, or in many cases Chat GPT, there’s no excuse to delay your action towards overcoming roadblocks.
Getting an action plan written down is something so easy yet so powerful that will help you start moving in the right direction. You don’t have to jump from A to Z…that’s how you get stuck. You just need to find a way to move one decision – one letter – at a time, from making a list, to executing each item on that list. If you’re a solo Founder like me, picking up the phone and calling a friend can also serve as the jumper cables you need to tackle some of those roadblocks you’re facing.
2) Dogs are great, but dogmas are dangerous
To be more specific, the dangerous dogma(s) I am referring to is ironically one that goes both ways:
“Trust your instincts – don’t let negative feedback impact your decision-making as an owner.” & “Listen to and take into account everything you hear from your market”
If you stick to your instincts 100% of the time and discount customer feedback, you’re on a fast track to becoming obsolete. On the flip-side, if you listen to everything that every customer says and try to adapt your product to serve them, you better have the backing of the Sovereign Wealth Fund or else you’ll reach the end of the road real fast.
The ability to synthesize information coming in and make smart business decisions is key. If you hear 50% of your market saying the same thing, you have to listen. If you have a one-off request from a lite user of your product, don’t feel like you need to be spending development dollars to make changes.
Similarly, you should ALWAYS keep your mind open to how your product should be positioned in the market. For example, Play-Doh was created first as a Wallpaper Cleaner. Luckily, their leadership team was open-minded and willing to rebrand based on what they were seeing and hearing from their market. We always say in marketing that people don’t know what they want, you have to tell them. Well, sometimes businesses don’t know where they fit in…and this is where we as business owners need to keep our ears open.
3) You are only as good as the team you build
In sports, there are differing philosophies on doubling down on your strengths vs. trying to improve your weaknesses. Luckily in business, we don’t necessarily have to worry about this as much. You might get a few months into building your business and realize you have a skill you didn’t quite realize.
For me, I found that I both enjoyed and was successful within the creative side, specifically building out the UI/UX design of SportsLab360. Therefore, I doubled down on this newfound skill, cutting costs and taking on all of the design work myself. I worked directly with my development team to implement what I had built, and avoided ever having to outsource that function.
On the flip side, I realized that selling face-to-face wasn’t my strong suit, nor was it something I enjoyed. So, I hired salespeople and created an ambassador program to compensate for my personal weakness of face-to-face selling.
So, whatever it is that you are trying to build, if you can live by these three tenants, you’ll set yourself up for success. And by the way, having an unrelenting work ethic and passion about what you’re doing was left off the list – hopefully that one is obvious ☺