033: Neil Patel – Don’t Try To Plan Everything Out

“Don’t try to plan everything out to the very last detail. I’m a big believer in just getting it out there: create a minimal viable product or website, launch it, and get feedback.” – Neil Patel

This was drawn by Nizar86. Check out his other work too!

Neil Patel is a popular and well respected online entrepreneur. I cannot find where this quote of his came from, but it would be hard anyway as Patel has written hundreds of articles himself. These articles are all part of a grand content marketing effort on his part. Patel writes the articles for the blogs of his businesses, like KISSmetrics and Quicksprout, his own personal blog, and for guest posts. It really is hard to find someone who is better and more in-tuned with content marketing than Patel.

Patel is pictured in this comic with his long time business partner, Hiten Shah. True to a lot of entrepreneurship advice about finding a co-founder, Shah is the partner in crime. All of of the businesses Patel is a part of (like those mentioned above), Shah is a part of too. You probably won’t see Shah as much, but he is an expert in his own right. Shah is one of the few people who helped make Growth Hacking become a thing.

My Take

I find this quote to be invaluable to entrepreneurs. This one quote is the essence of the book The Lean Startup. Sure, a rough plan at the start is important. This way, you will know in which direction you are heading. Then, when the plan starts moving forwards, all sort of hiccups and problems start popping up. In entrepreneurship, this can come in the form of slow sales, user dissatisfaction, or even internal conflict. Realistically speaking, a lot of these problems can’t be predicted during the planning stage. Murphy’s Law is going to come at you hard. But if you know where you are going, then it’s all a matter of just fixing these problems along the way. This is a much better solution than waiting for the best time to start. Maybe the new startup isn’t going quite as planned, but as long as it is moving forward or failing forward, then it’s as good as it gets.

This reminds me of another quote: “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” – Robert Burns

If you have a startup story about just getting out there and taking action, instead of just waiting for things to happen, let me know in the comments below.

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