Overcoming the Fear of Feedback

One of the biggest hurdles you face as a new entrepreneur, building an online product, is the ‘fear’ of feedback. Overcoming that fear can start a learning process that can help your business.

It’s a familiar scenario: you have worked hard at your product, but it isn’t quite ready yet. If you can just grab a couple of more days to fix the obvious bugs, tweak the design, add another social network integration…and days turn to weeks, and weeks into months. You fear the reaction of your friends, mentors and the public. “Is this what you have been working on?!”. You want to do better. You know you can do better.

Isolated development: it’s an easy trap to fall into. Your team feel like you are building your business, but yet you are learning virtually nothing that will help.

The learning process is key to your success. Yes, you have a long list of features to develop, but do the users really want those features? Is your core proposition right? Is there enough demand for your product?

Without putting the product in front of users it is impossible to learn the answer to these questions! Anything else is just speculation.

Getting over that fear brings three things:

• Immediate feedback and help. You can now show people your work. They will help you. Mentors and friends will better understand what you are trying to achieve. Support and opportunities will present themselves.
• A surge of productivity – you have to make things better if it’s out there. Nothing is quite as motivating as other people being able to see your work. You have something tangible to build on. Iterative improvement will get you there.
• A sense of relief – it’s out there, and now there is nothing you can do about it! You’ve taken the next step on your journey, and it’s exciting.

So on that note, please do come and help me build Seeu.at – my startup. We’re helping people find the ‘right deals in the right places’ with their friends. Because who do you want to hear from when you’re planning a night out? Groupon? Living Social? …or your friends?

We’ve launched a Glasgow preview and are looking for feedback. So if you have any feedback then please do leave it either using the feedback link on Seeu.at, via my Twitter, or commenting here.