One of the best things about video games is the ability to restart – you can use your learnings to move faster and avoid obstacles. We often think about what we would do differently if we were starting over in business and we figured others probably think about this as well and so we asked the community to share their thoughts with us.

Ezra Bird

If I were start over again with all of my different entrepreneurial ventures I would focus all of my energy on customer validation. The hardest thing when creating something new is ensuring that someone else besides you actually wants the solution that you’ve created. There have been countless projects that I’ve sunken an unbelievable amount of hours into before actually showing it someone else. Isolating yourself while creating something innovative might seem smart — you’re protecting your grand new idea from being stolen, right? In reality it does far more harm than good, you’re preventing other perspectives and potentially critical insights about your product from ever reaching you. Learning to let others into my design process has been challenging but well worth it as the feedback that I receive gives me direction into how my solutions are received and what things I’ve overlooked. If I was able to go back in time and put my products into the target customers hands earlier I would’ve saved time, money and gotten to market faster. Read more>>

Daniel Grandfield

There are a few main recommendations I would make to anyone who is starting to grow their business. The one I talk about the most is choosing software, systems and team members that you can grow into and grow with you. It is easy to choose the cheapest software or team member, but once you start to really grow the business, you can easily outgrow the software/systems you initially started with and have to start over with something that suits your needs now and in the future, costing you a lot of time in an important growth period. Same goes for hiring team members, the cheapest is not always the best and having to constantly retrain new team members has a huge opportunity cost on the business for lost time. Read more>>

Tyler Ostheim

Looking back I was under the impression I needed to have product to sell before any type of action can be taken. As I have learned. Product would appear to be a final step. I should have hired a company initially! To take quality video and photographs and publicize the brand for several months. Showcasing different shirts and hats and making people aware of the brand. Use the first severK thousand dollars in marketing and professional website design as well as photographs. Once the brand has a following, we then drop exclusive lines of apparel. Read more>>