How I survived Mount Stupid (and you can too)

This is one of the most important graphs for aspiring entrepreneurs: 

When you’re first evaluating a business idea, you know very little about it. But then, you start thinking about it: the upside, the possibilities, how much money you could make. So you put together a business plan. You’re convinced. This is gonna be the next big thing. And you’re gonna build it. 

In 2020, I was part of an accelerator program called Entrepreneur First: they select 50-60 aspiring entrepreneurs, half commercial, half technical, and do this: 

You get 12 weeks to find your next co-founder, figure out a business idea that you can build together, and then validate it so much that they can invest into your business.

Since you don’t find your co-founder week one, you often have 1-2 months to validate a business and build so much traction so that they’ll say yes to investing at a ~1M EUR post-money valuation. 

Naturally, a lot of high-flying ideas were thrown around. An AI that evaluates your squat position using your phone camera. Brown algae farming. Sponsorship for eSports streamers. Wearables for seniors. 

And all of them seemed like fantastic ideas when first starting out. 

The problem? We knew nothing.

But we had an idea, and we were climbing Mount Stupid quickly. 

“Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” – Ed Viesturs

Ed Viesturs is an American high-altitude mountaineer and the 12th person in the world to climb all fourteen 8000m peaks. He became famous for his role in the disastrous 1996 expedition onto Everest, that was later turned both into a movie (“Everest”) and a book (Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air”). 

The reason that 1996 expedition failed wasn’t that the climbers didn’t make it to the summit. It’s that most of them never made it back down. 

Fortunately, as entrepreneurs, we find meaning in building businesses, not in putting our lives at risk climbing places where humans really shouldn’t be. 

But we also need to make it down the mountain.

Mount Stupid, specifically. 

How to descend Mount Stupid as fast as possible 

Here’s a harsh truth: whatever business idea you have, there’s a 99.9% chance someone else has tried it before or is currently working on it. 

This applies to business ideas, content creation, anything that is or could be valuable.

Hell, this certainly ain’t the first newsletter about the Dunning-Kruger-Effect. Nor will it be the last one. 

Accepting this fundamental truth is the first step towards the descent of Mount Stupid. Entrepreneurship means facing reality: having hard conversations and asking uncomfortable questions. 

The earlier you do this, the better.

This isn't easy. You will shy away from it, because what you will learn might imply that you'll fail. Which hurts your ego.

The dream is still alive until you face reality. You can't fail if you never start.

So once you've reached the summit of Mount Stupid, it's time to think about the descent. Just like in mountaineering, every minute you hang out there pushes you a little closer to perishing.

Here are a few ways to accelerate your descent: 

[1] Customer Development

Back to Factory Berlin, the co-working space the ~55 entrepreneurs from our EF cohort are working in. The space is buzzing – business ideas from ordinary B2B FinTech SaaS to electric jet engines are being discussed. 

The biggest flex? 

“Dude, I did 25 customer interviews last week”. 

At EF, you’re drilled to speak to as many customers as possible as early as possible. “How many customer development interviews did you do last week?” is a standard question. 

By speaking to customers and asking the right questions, you’re forced to face reality. It’s easy to cook something up in your head, but the learning only begins when you start talking to the people you think might benefit from this program. Only to be proven totally wrong. 

Example: I was working on the personal training AI, and most of our interviewees were people from my social circle. Mostly athletes.

So my techy co-founder suggested that we interview some of his friends, which … well, let’s say they fit the stereotype of typical software engineers. One guy had torn his ACL 9 months prior. I asked him how the surgery went and how his rehab process came along.

He looked at me, puzzled: “I never had surgery. It just wasn’t convenient with work.” – “And have you done any sports since?” – “No, because I have a torn ACL.” 

I was barely able to suppress my reaction (which would’ve been along the lines of, “YO, WTF?!”). 

That was a big lesson: there are people out there who, apparently, simply don’t care whether they’re injured and don’t want to do anything about it. Quite an important insight if you’re building software and think this might be a good target group. 

Takeaway: go speak to your potential customers as early as possible. 

How do you do this? I won’t explain it in this newsletter, but you should really read “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick. Mandatory reading at EF, and easily one of my top 3 recommended books. 

[2] Competitive Research

“We’re the only ones doing this right now” is a surefire sign for one of two things: 

1. You’re doing something that’s simply not valuable, and hence nobody else is doing it. 
2. You haven’t done your competitive research properly. 

Face the facts: somebody else is building something exactly like you right now, or has done it before.

That’s good: it means you’re pursuing something valuable, and there’s someone out there educating your market. 

I was briefly pissed when I realized that around the same time I founded Generalyst, another company emerged that does the exact same f**king thing.

Then, I realized that they just saved me a lot of time in market validation. Nice. 

Still, it’s painful to realize your idea isn’t as unique as you think. So better get it out of your system as soon as possible. 

Takeaway: spend a lot of time researching your competition. You might just learn a thing or two. 

[3] Rapid Hypothesis Invalidation

In a nutshell, the scientific method is: observe → ask a question → form a hypothesis → make a prediction → test the hypothesis. 

We can apply the same to startups, content, etc: by forming hypotheses and testing them as fast as possible. Here’s a cool way to do this: 

1. Write down all underlying assumptions that you have about your business, as obvious as they might be 
2. Formulate these assumptions as hypotheses that you can invalidate 
3. Start working through them one by one as systematically as possible 

Pro tip: do this with someone else that’s not involved in whatever you’re doing – often, they can spot underlying assumptions better than yourself, as you’ve likely already internalized them. 

The important (but also hard) thing here is to formulate your hypotheses in a way that you can invalidate them. Be your own advocatus diaboli. Try to find the flaws in your hypotheses – the earlier you find them, the better. 

You’d much rather honestly figure out that your business is flawed early on, than build something that doesn’t work for a while and find out later. 

This is hard, but it forces you to face reality. 

And that’s what entrepreneurship is about. 

In the last few months, I’ve been up and down Mount Stupid with my new business, Generalyst. At the end of the descent, I came up with all sorts of crazy ideas: 

• “I should do other professions”
• “I should totally expand internationally” (even though, there’s an entire chapter in my unpublished book about the topic that international expansion is not a band-aid for fundamental problems in your business)
• “I should build AI Agents” 

No, dude.

The secret to overnight success is days, months, years of consistent work. 

Stay on the f**king bus. 

Unlike so many of his peers, Ed Viesturs made it down from the 1996 expedition from Everest. That didn’t keep him from going up the mountain again. Or any other mountain for that matter – as recently as May 2021, he made his 216th ascent to Mount Rainier in Washington State. 

So when you’ve had an idea, thought it was awesome, and then fell into a valley of despair after facing harsh truths – keep going. 

After the descent comes the next ascent. 

PS: Some reading material –

1. Read Viestur’s autobiography “No Shortcuts to the Top” – the book is absolutely gripping, I didn’t wanna put it down at all. 
2. I stole the Dunning-Kruger-Effect graphic from a blog written by a guy named Steve (this post). Check out his about section, the dude looks like an absolute legend. 
3. If you’re curious about Entrepreneur First – I wrote a long article about my experience there that’s been shared widely. 

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