Important Lessons Learned Through Mistakes Made by a First-Time Entrepreneur

There's a good reason why investors look for experienced entrepreneurs. Even if one isn’t successful, each venture teaches you a number of lessons, which quickly seem obvious in retrospect.

My goal here is to help people starting a company to make fewer mistakes by hearing about some of mine below.

1) Keeping your idea too close to your chest. 

When you first stumble upon your business idea, it will feel very tempting to keep it within an inner circle of trusted advisors. When we first came up with MedPilot, I was terrified that someone would beat me in bringing a solution to market. 

However, in order to succeed, you're going to need all the help you can get. The more you talk through your business with investors, potential team members & other collaborators, the more you avoid the reality distortion effect. As we continued having conversations, we found MedPilot's initial idea evolved into something more robust, which better solved the core problems of medical billing.

Now, I never miss an opportunity to share my plans and see what the person sitting next to me can add. I had the good fortune of attending the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, and talked to everyone from Bradley Cooper to former New York Governor David Paterson. By the end of it, I had discovered avenues to meet with lobbyists and supporters that I never could have found on my own.

2) Getting caught up on the highs and lows.

Everything is extremely exhilarating when you are launching your first venture. This energy will be the key to your momentum, but it can also easily derail your plans if you get too focused on it. 

At MedPilot, we spent a month cultivating a relationship with a company who was supposed to be our first client, only to have them completely fall off the map and stop responding to emails and calls. Experienced entrepreneurs have been through the failed business partnerships, lost customers and investors, and made the necessary changes to the business. But those of us who are going at it for the first time can easily think it’s the end of the world when stuff doesn’t work out immediately.

Conversely, you’ll find no shortage of people who will seem excited to invest or partner with you. But you can't celebrate until the ink has dried. Investors are incentivized to always keep doors open. They’ll tell you that they like what they see, and to “stay in touch as you progress.” Don't get too comfortable with that. Just stay focused on your initial goal: executing your idea.

Remember, everyone before you has failed multiple times, both big and small, before getting to where they are now. You’ll be no different, so just relax and bear with the ride.

3) Not validating the product idea with your customers.

Make sure to truly grasp everything about the customer you are looking to help. We launched MedPilot with the understanding that millions of patients are being burdened by medical bills that they couldn’t afford. We designed a platform to connect people struggling with their medical expenses to advocates that could help them negotiate their bills in order to make them more manageable. What we didn’t take into account was that even though the fee for the advocate would come out of the money saved, it still might be too much for the patient. We needed to pivot our model.

Our mission to help the millions of people who couldn’t afford their bills stayed intact, but we needed to shift the price of our service from the patient to their provider in order to successfully execute it.

Launching our initial model was actually a blessing in disguise because we were able to learn all of the underlying reasons patients were having trouble affording their bills and build them into our new product to make it more effective for our clients. We were lucky, a lot of companies aren’t. Make sure to really understand everything about the customer you are going after.