How to use pre-mortems to avoid failure

“We are hardwired to spot threats more easily than positive events.”

Google Exec Daniel Rizea argues that to succeed, startups must plan not to fail. It sounds obvious, but how do you do that?

Well, rather than hold a post-mortem to decipher why something went wrong, you can hold a pre-mortem where you imagine that your project has failed and come up with reasons why; then, you can work backward to avoid them.

The pre-mortem is best done in three stages:

1. The “what if?” stage — It’s time to uncover the unknowns. Conduct a broad brainstorming on the potential risks the project might suffer. Rank them from high to low. After the first 5–8 obvious risks, something magical will happen. You will start coming up with new risks, things you haven’t considered.

2. The "what now?” stage — After identifying the risks in the previous stage, think of mitigations. If you don’t have time to go through every risk, choose to mitigate the most important ones. How can you identify them? They have the highest scores in terms of impact and likelihood.

3. Accountability and tracking — Without this phase, you have just worried about a ton of stuff with no action points. After identifying risks and mitigation plans, assign owners. Check with the owners regularly on the progress of the plans and how they are doing.

👉️ If you want more on the science behind the pre-mortem, head here: This One Trick From a Google Exec Will Help You Avoid Failure

How to start, grow and sell a startup without VC

“I wear the customer-first badge. Proudly. I strongly believe raising money through customer sales is the best option, and in a lot of cases, it should be the only option.”

Joe Procopio is a multi-exit entrepreneur who has been down both the self-funded and VC-funded paths many times. While VC has its benefits, the landscape for funding is… not great at present. Luckily, it’s not the be-all and end-all; you can still get your company off the ground and even sell it, all without that injection of investor cash.

Here are three ways to do it:

1. Automate a service into a product — Start with a service that’s both valuable and profitable, get better and better at it, and make parts of the process repeatable and reusable. Evolve your approach until your service becomes quicker, more cost-efficient, and can be performed by someone other than just you (who become your employees). If you can evolve your service into a product, you can get acquired at a pretty good return.

2. Spin a new company out of your old job — Every company has its share of folks looking around their vast cubicle mazes and asking that question, “You know what this place needs?” Entrepreneurs seize this moment and start their own thing to answer that question. This is not an easy path, though. Even if you can squeeze out a new company from an existing company, the old company will still be the big player and still have muscle to flex. But if you can survive those initial battles, break out, and stand out, the odds of success are pretty high.

3. Start from scratch and reinvest — The hardest route to a customer-first startup because if the idea is worthy, it’s likely something that has never been done. There’s no roadmap, no market screaming for your product, no advisor or mentor who can come in and tell you how to get started. But it’s the most rewarding. You wind up with a company with VC-level growth prospects and, if you play your cards right, almost 100% ownership. No dilution.

👉️ Click here for more on how to start, grow, and sell a company without venture capital

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