Toronto Entrepreneur

Research is a great way to get started with anything. But the real question is when do you research and more importantly how long do you research. Coming from UofT has really framed my thinking academically. Like everything else, being academic has its pros and cons. But for a startup you cannot be too academic and you need to mix that with enough agility. You need to realize research never ends unless you end it and get to do some real work. Research can really daunt you in any stage of your startup. You might spend too much time figuring out what features should go into your product. You might end up spending way to much time in the design, or perfecting the business plan or even in your implementation. I was having a conversation with some friends tonight on whether J2EE is better or PHP for developing a social networking web-application. My answer was PHP simply because it’s more agile and therefore it suits a startup environment better.

Having an academic background can constantly force you to feel insecure as if you haven’t done enough research but the nature of a startup is so that you cannot purely approach it academically. A tech startup is all about building stuff, putting it out there, getting user feedback and building upon those feedbacks. You basically have to accept that you will make mistakes and you will learn not to make them again. You cannot avoid many of those mistakes by simply doing more research. I recently watched a presentation by Dharmesh Shah which he gave at Business of Software, and he said “if you’re not ashamed of your first release that means you waited too long.” The presentation was really great and I think if you’re interested enough to read so far of this post, you should definitely watch it. The point is that you will make mistakes and why not make them earlier than later. Your early adopters are usually forgiving enough.

So make sure you start with research but don’t get stuck in the details because as I said in one of my previous posts the devil is in the details. Once you figure out the skeleton of what’s next on your agenda, then go ahead and bring it to life. You can iterate over it later and make it better. Us entrepreneurs tend to get tired of research after a while and it sort of slows down our motivation. We’re all about getting things checked off the list and making them work better and better.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard