You’re not the customer!

A common theme in MBA marketing courses is that you, the marketer, are not the customer. The idea is that you need to validate your messaging, medium, and even product with the customer to ensure you’re doing things correctly. After all, you may be a 30-year old product manager for a product targeted at baby-boomers. Or you may be responsible for selling a gender-specific product to the opposite sex. In these cases you clearly are not qualified to act as a proxy for the customer.

But what about in a startup?

I tend to think that the best opportunities are those you uncover because you feel the pain yourself and the startup is your way of relieving that pain. This is clearly a generalization and even if you are the customer you’re not able to speak on behalf of every customer but as an entrepreneur with finite resources sometimes your best course of action is to build and market a product you’d want to use yourself.

So, you tell me. When is the best time to figure things out internally and when does it make more sense to go outside the company to find the answer?

MBA… Startup? I don’t get it.

With my first post I figured it made sense to discuss some of the reasons why I’ve decided to take on the herculean task of writing a regular blog aside from my own personal vanity. Sure, writing a blog sounds like fun and from what I hear it only consumes a few hours per day from my already wide-open schedule. Plus, the world’s been crying out, “Brian, there are too few blogs on the Internet and this one will finally bring the insight that has been lacking.”

In actuality, I’ve been fighting it but just as I’m compelled toward entrepreneurial ventures I’ve been compelled to write a blog knowing that in both cases the odds of success are against me. I hope the interplay between the experiences of starting a company and all-that-is business school will make for an interesting discussion, time will tell.

I’ve been asked on more than one occasion, “If you knew you were going to start a company [or work for a startup] why did you decide to get an MBA?” That’s a fair question. People go to B-school for a lot of reasons but I came back to school to meet people. As you can see from my bio I’m a startup guy and I learned the hard way how difficult it is to build a company without a quality team. There’s something magical that happens for a brief two-year period when the letters MBA meet the word Student, you’re presented with countless opportunities to meet leaders in the community who welcome sharing their experiences and, in many cases, contacts. Seattle is great for startups and the people who’ve been-there-and-done-that go out of their way to give back. Andy Sack, for example, is teaching one of my entrepreneur courses, he’s a great resource for people like me and he walks willingly onto campus twice a week to meet with us for two hours.

Nevertheless, two years and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, or in my case a little over $100k, is a high price to pay to meet people. It’s not like there’s a shortage of successful entrepreneurs without college degrees let alone MBA’s to suggest an advanced degree is a requirement. B-school is an expensive option but, just like a startup, it’s an opportunity to compress many years of effort into just a few so I decided that its numerous benefits offered the greatest return on my investment.

I don’t know their names but there are people who I’m searching for somewhere out there and they’re looking for me but the world’s a big place. So I guess this blog, like my decision to pursue an MBA, is about the same thing – meeting a bunch of smart people while looking for the right ones.

P.S. Despite my reason for returning to school I am now better equipped to start a company or work for a startup. I’ve noticed on occasion there are some misunderstandings about the nature and purpose of business school and I’m a bit of a walking billboard for the Foster School of Business so I’m happy to discuss the program and b-school in general.