Stone Soup: Entrepreneurship Myths #Busted
If you’ve made it here you’re probably asking yourself… WTF is stone soup?
Well, it’s a European folk story meant to illustrate the value of sharing.
It also happens to be the perfect metaphor for entrepreneurship.
Grab your popcorn:
Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the very hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit of garnish, which they are missing, to improve the flavor.
The villager, who anticipates enjoying a share of the soup, does not mind parting with a few carrots, so these are added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not yet reached its full potential. The villager hands them a little bit of seasoning. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by travelers and villagers alike. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty meal which they share with the donors.
You’re probably catching the parallel here. All companies have one thing in common: they start from nothing.
Much like the traveler in our story began with nothing more than an empty pot and created a delicious soup, founders build companies from scratch by telling a compelling story that convinces others to create something wonderful with them. The company, like the soup, becomes incrementally better one step at a time as others contribute to its success.
The only regret that I have about entrepreneurship is that I didn’t do it sooner.
I always wanted to start a company, but I was too preoccupied with all the things that I perceived to be standing in my way. I let myself believe that I didn’t have enough experience, enough money, enough time, a good enough idea, a big enough network, etc.
But I was missing the point. There is never a perfect time to start. You just do it anyway and you figure it out.
For me, entrepreneurship started with an unexpected layoff. I had no advanced notice. I had no team. I had no financial plan. I had minimal capital to put into the company. I had nothing more than an empty pot and a vision of the delicious soup it could become.
Since then, I’ve spent day after day sharing my story. I share my story with potential hires, partners, investors, and customers.
Real-talk: it’s uncomfortable. Confidently telling an ambitious story for months on end while feeling like you still have such modest traction is brutal. Not everyone will want to help you make your soup (in my opinion, what is missing from the stone soup story is the hundreds of villagers who must have walked by and showed no interest in the soup.) Rejection and imposter syndrome are real nags.
But, with enough patience and enough optimism, it happens. Little by little. And it’s worth it.
Are any of these “entrepreneurship myths” holding you back?
Myth #1: “I don’t have any good ideas”
You’d be surprised. It’s easy to assume that startup ideas must come exclusively from serendipitous moments of inspiration, but that’s not the case. You can in fact become good at generating ideas with practice. When I did my Chrysalis fellowship in May, we spent an entire week focused exclusively on idea generation (resources linked below.) It was amazing how studying frameworks for idea generation and having an intentional focus on problem solving turned me into an idea machine seemingly overnight.
Another misconception is that ideas have to be novel. Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. If you’ve ever come up with an idea, Googled it, found something similar, and given up - consider re-framing that next time. Rather than thinking “someone else is already doing it, so I can’t” - try thinking “someone is already doing it; how can I do it in a superior or differentiated way?”
Context that is frequently missing around the viability of an idea is market size. Markets like third-party food delivery ($16B TAM + growing) can support lots of players - and offer compelling opportunities to build a big business by picking a niche (just ask Slice or Chowbus.) Don’t fall into the trap of believing that white spaces are the only good places to build a company.
Myth #2: “I don’t have a network”
Yes you do. You have a network because the moment that you take the crazy, beautiful, leap of faith to start a company, you’re officially in the club. And I have great news: the #1 rule of the founder’s club is that founders support others founders.
There are so many great founder communities that have helped me. Join Slack groups. Download Upstream. Join Lunchclub. Attend events. Ask for intros. Put yourself out there (and don’t wait until you launch your company to start.)
I knew only a handful of investors when I started my journey at IndiFit. Today, I’ve pitched 80 of them. I promise that the puzzle pieces will fall into place and your starting point has very little bearing on how far you can go.
Myth #3: “I don’t have enough money”
I do recognize that everyone’s financial circumstances are different and that I was privileged to have some unique options at my disposal when I decided to go a year without a paycheck cold turkey (leveraging equity in my condo, moving in with my significant other, moonlighting in the wild world of bitcoin, etc.)
However, I think there are a few misconceptions about the amount of capital that it takes to start a company:
It’s okay to pay yourself. It takes work, but you can raise small amounts of capital for a business as early as the idea stage. Investors just want honesty from you - if you need to pay yourself a modest salary early in your company’s journey in order to prevent financial hardship, the right partners will support you in doing that.
Scrappiness is free. In IndiFit’s first 6 months in operation, we spent less than $10k. We had a launched platform that 70 instructors trusted to manage their business… and we spent under $10k. How? We did scrappy things. We had a scrappy product built with low-code tools. We used scrappy (and free) customer acquisition tactics like direct outreach on social media. We found scrappy service providers who agreed to equity-based or deferred payment structures. The barriers to entry have never been lower.
You won’t regret the sacrifices. I’ve made a lot of sacrifices since starting IndiFit. Travel, daily coffee shop runs, fancy restaurants, new clothes, etc. simply aren’t in the cards anymore, but as I wrote about in my last post - I don’t miss a thing. Entrepreneurship does require material sacrifices, but they are in service of something so much more meaningful. You just figure it out.
If you’re thinking about making some stone soup of your own, there has never been a better time to pull out your pot.
Ideation Resources:
