Is perfectionism costing you money?
I meet so many new entrepreneurs who have spent months perfecting their idea. They have gone over every aspect, trying to come up with an idea that will sell.
But no matter how much time and energy you spend, the real proof is in the pudding. That means putting your idea out there and testing it out.
The fact is, you don’t truly know what works and what doesn’t until you try it out. You can spend months or years “thinking” about your product, and not making any money because you haven’t launched yet. And when you do launch it, what if people don’t’ buy? You’ve spent all that time for nothing.
Here are some ways I’ve seen people get stuck in the cycle of perfectionism.
Creating a long, detailed, excruciatingly in-depth work/business plan/agenda. (Planning is important, but taking action is more important!)
Writing and rewriting blog posts. (Your readers don’t really care if your grammar isn’t completely perfect—they care more that you are sharing helpful information!)
Tweaking and re-tweaking their website. (It’s better to launch a reasonable but imperfect site now, than wait a year to launch a perfect one!)
Perfectionism can often cause problems like these, especially if you are just starting out. And, hey, I get it—you want to make sure your product/service is good before you launch it. That makes for satisfied customers and good reviews, right?
Yes, but…
There is a difference between good and perfect. Both have quality, but perfect takes WAY more time. And, yes, time is money. Here are some of the ways perfectionism costs you.
It costs you time
It costs you money
It’s risky
It’s exhausting
You’ll find out why as we go through the rest of this article.
A better way
I’ve struggled with perfectionism myself in the past. In one case, I was trying to create an online course. I actually thought about it for a couple of years. But I wasn’t taking action! I spent a lot of time thinking and planning, and I even got some content written. But I wanted to get it right before I actually started offering it.
So, what happened? Well, I started reading about ways to launch a new product, and how perfectionism can prevent you from doing that. And I learned about two methods that completely changed the way I approached product development. One is pilot trials, and the other is minimal viable product.
Pilot trials
Pilot trials are launches of a service/product that isn’t perfected yet. They are like first drafts. They are especially helpful if you offer services as opposed to products.
The idea is that you sell your service before you have “perfected” it (usually long before). So, the first time you offer it, it is to a group of people who know that it is still in the development/beta stage. Typically, they get a discount in exchange for agreeing to give you feedback and perhaps even testimonials.
Pilot trials are typically offered before a company starts any serious advertising for that particular service. They are part of the development/testing phase and are basically focus groups that give you feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
The logic behind the pilot trial approach is simple: you want to test your idea/service out in the early stages of development. This is to make sure it is something people will actually pay for. This is really important—there is no point in developing something that people don’t want to buy! So pilot trials help you determine the answer to a critical question: WILL IT SELL?
If you spend months or years perfecting something first, only to then find out people aren’t interested, you’ll have wasted a ton of time, money, and energy. Then you’ll have to start all over again.
And there are other benefits to pilot trials.
You get money earlier in the game;
You get feedback from the participants, and that helps you fine tune your service in the right direction (the direction that people are looking for);
You have wins sooner, which helps boost your ego and energy;
You get testimonials to use in future advertising.
Trials give you a chance to see what the response to your service will be and to learn about any problems that might exist. You actively seek honest feedback from the participants and use that information to improve your service. That way, you’ll KNOW you have a product that will sell, and you can then make some improvements for a more successful run the second time. And you’ll make money way sooner than you would have if you had waited until the product was “perfect”. Also, you won’t have spent hours and hours developing something that ends up not selling.
I eventually tried the pilot trials approach with my first online course. We just met online, live each time, and I used first drafts of handouts and rough notes of what I wanted to cover in each session. During, and at the end of the course, I asked for constructive feedback—what did people like, what didn’t they like, and what would they liked to have seen more of?
That feedback helped me craft the fully online version. Not only was that second version better than the first, it also contained elements that I knew people wanted, since I had tested it out in my first course. So I knew that I had something that people wanted and would be willing to pay for.
Minimal Viable Products
Now, when I talk about first drafts or pilot trials, I’m not promoting sloppiness. You still need to have something that is reasonably good. Otherwise you won’t impress people at all. What I am saying is that you need something good, but not perfect. That’s where the idea of a minimal viable product comes in.
As I mentioned, in order to run your pilot trial you need a version of your service that’s good enough. This version is called a minimal viable product. Basically that just means a product that is good enough to be launched. It’s the beginning version of your product/service that we talked about earlier in this article.
Do you think that an expensive shoe brand just invents a new shoe and puts it straight on the market? Absolutely not. They have many people try them out and give feedback first. Then the shoes are tweaked as necessary before they are mass marketed.
Putting it all together
Pilot trials involve putting a service out there that isn’t perfected yet. A minimal viable product is a version of that service that is of at least enough quality that it can be launched as a pilot. This goes back to my idea of avoiding sloppiness—your product has to have enough value to be worth putting out there, even at the pilot trial stage.
Pilot trials and minimal viable products are only tools to help you achieve a goal. They are not the end goal in themselves. You can’t just keep offering the trials or minimal viable product—they won’t be good enough to sustain an ongoing business. The idea is that you take that feedback you get and use it to turn your offering into a finished, polished product.
That’s when you can let more of your perfectionism kick in. But it will be a better targeted perfectionism, because you have discovered exactly what people are looking for and can fine tune your product to meet the needs you know they have, instead of just what you thought they had.
So, save all those extra hours you would have put into perfecting your product until after you have feedback from your trials. It is a much better use of your time!