How You Can Build Your Entire Company With This Step-by-Step Framework: Disciplined Entrepreneurship
As this survey from Babson college (2019) denotes, 55% of Americans have started at least one business in their lifetime. By the same token, about 50% of businesses close within their first five years of life (Bureau of Labor Statistics). A business may be a deceptively simple-looking activity (i.e., offering something of value to a group of people who truly need it). Except, it is not simple. Business is complex by definition.
Complexity stems from the many factors interacting together at the same time, making things challenging to fully conceptualize. One of the key reasons for such a high failure rate is the lack of a systematic approach to business analysis and taking calculated risks.
When starting a new venture, it is difficult to even envision all the components you need to get up and running successfully. This is why I believe disciplined entrepreneurship is a valuable framework for assessing the value of your idea, its feasibility, costs, revenue estimates, and product specifications—and then act on it or shut it down and try again (hence saving your time on implementing non-feasible ideas).
Disciplined entrepreneurship is a framework for innovators, entrepreneurs, startup founders, or product managers taught at MIT and developed over time by prof. Bill Aulet. Disciplined entrepreneurship is not a shiny tool that can do the work for you. It is a 24-step framework that holds your hand and guides you through all the steps it takes for you to establish a solid, long-lasting business or innovative product. It is also a great tool to find out if it’s better for you to quit your idea and pursue a different one, which is an amazing benefit because quitting an idea feels almost impossible to almost everyone, especially when you have the idea yourself and are emotionally attached to it.
What it is for
*Disciplined entrepreneurship *is for anyone who is looking to explore their innovative idea in depth to find out (a) if it’s actually an innovative idea, (b) if it’s a good idea from a customer, business, and technical perspective, (c) how to implement the idea to create new markets or innovate existing ones.
Disciplined entrepreneurship is a framework that takes cognitive effort, authentic emotional detachment from the idea, and some time. With those three ingredients accepted and in place, it can provide you with a life-enhancing trajectory and mental model to validate, test, and implement your ideas from the very early stages to having a product that’s ready to use.
The framework explained
Disciplined entrepreneurship (DE) is composed of 6 major themes, each of which is broken down into steps, for a total of 24 steps. You must take each step sequentially, following the order proposed in the original framework. The core focus of the entire DE journey is to take the perspective of the customer and get out of your own way. When you build an innovative product, it is especially crucial to do customer research to validate or falsify your hypotheses of what your target customers want.
It is true that sometimes customers do not know what they want until you put the thing in front of them and market it in such a compelling way that it sticks in their minds (e.g., Ford, Apple). It is also true that this is the exception, and customer research with early adopters can go a long way in helping you get a sense of the value of your innovative idea.
By implementing the DE framework, you back up your business with real-life customer research, systematically. This is already a competitive advantage for you, because most businesses and startups do not go through this phase, and they are more likely to fail within their first five years of life. You put in more work upfront to reap the benefits in the near future.