Spend 30 minutes building paper airplanes and you’ll quickly learn some of the most important lessons in entrepreneurship.
![Entrepreneur's Handbook](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fill:48:48/1*8sfeJBcpkpaPmv9Epi2Pjw.png)
When entrepreneurs enter the startup world for the first time, they assume their success will be the result of offering a great product. After all, every successful company they’ve ever heard of prior to launching their own — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, etc. — has built and sold a wildly popular product. However, if they launch enough startups, they’ll eventually learn that product quality plays a relatively small role in the early success (or failure) of a given company. Simply put, in the early days of building a company, a startup’s product doesn’t matter nearly as much as most new entrepreneur’s think, and they’d be wise to spend less time worrying about what they’re building and more time worrying about how they’re going to get the thing they’re building into the hands of paying customers.
The quicker entrepreneurs learn this lesson, the quicker they’ll start building successful companies. In fact, this is my core thesis as an entrepreneurship educator. I teach entrepreneurship courses at Duke University, and I believe the sooner I can get young entrepreneurs thinking about customer acquisition, the better their chances of success.
Unfortunately, it’s a terribly hard lesson to teach because it contradicts everything we see and hear about entrepreneurship in popular media.
Consider, for a moment, your own experiences learning about entrepreneurship. Any business success story you’ve ever heard surely revolves around the company’s product. For example, Apple’s success is always attributed to its innovative products. Amazon is recognized for building its massive, online marketplace. And the first thing anyone thinks about when discussing Tesla are its electric cars.
In other words, every well-known business success story is culturally anchored to a company’s product, so, naturally, new entrepreneurs assume products are what make companies successful.
And, to be fair, products might ultimately drive the success or failure of every company. After all, would…