Here is One Mistake All Innovators Make

Innovators gonna Innovate

I have spent a big chunk of my life among innovators. Most of them are ridiculously predictable in their mistakes .

There is one mistake in particular that every single innovator I ever worked with made at some point, yours truly included.

If you are an entrepreneur, bringing innovation to market, do not make this mistake.

*Do not try to innovate in every aspect of your business.*

Follow the Playbook

As you are bringing your innovation to market you will encounter many problems that are actually solved.

Millions before you have trialed-and-errored them into conventional “good practices”. There are playbooks for these problems and it is almost guaranteed that just running the playbook will give you better results out of the box than your very innovative solution. There maybe exceptions to this, but they are so few that they basically confirm the principle.

Solved problems with great playbooks include:

1. Org. structures;
2. Marketing plans;
3. Landing pages;
4. Funnel design;
5. Content plans;
6. Accounting/ expenses practices

When I say these are “solved” problems, what I mean is there is a pretty advanced, functional place you can start from day one and then you continue optimizing as you go.

The thing to do is you customize the playbook, you go live and then immediately you look at your numbers and start optimizing. This means that you take one day to create a landing page, rather than 1 month. Or it means that you can kick off a content strategy in a matter of days rather than months. The benefits of speed and rapid feedback loops compound in ways that your innovative approach to these things will not, almost guaranteed.

The Innovator’s Trap

What you should NOT do is spend weeks upon weeks of precious time trying to re-invent org structures or landing pages before you even have product on market.

“Innovation juice” is a scarce resource, just like time or cash.

Direct these towards your product – the place where they will make a difference. Do not waste these precious resources on parts of your business that are commoditized.