After choosing the right people, a second key thing is to ensure you get feedback and make it as useful as possible and therefore adopt the right behaviour for receiving it. Always try to listen to the person carefully rather than trying to defend or justify your idea. The idea of feedback is to gather as many comments about your idea as possible. Instead of defending yourself, I recommend that you instead ask what solution the person being interviewed can think of to solve your issue. And if you feel that you are always getting the same comments, this is where you need to improve your idea, where you need to adapt your prototype. I won't deny that coming face to face with the reality on the ground and gathering feedback can include situations where you'll realise that your initial idea doesn't work quite so well. Sometimes it is better to ditch an idea that you like but which does not receive good feedback. Far too many people go experience these situations as failures. They are not failures. It is an expected part of the life of an entrepreneur and this is where you will learn a great deal and will be able to mature thanks to these experiences. Just like children who fall over time after time before learning to walk properly, a good entrepreneur is not somebody who never falls over, but rather somebody who learns something each time they fall over. Have a listen to Maÿlis Dupont as she tells you her own experience of failure and how she sees it today. I set up an internet company in the field of media and on-line video in 2011. A company that was fairly capital-intensive because we did a lot of R&D. We must have only spent about 10 months in R&D, so fairly removed from the realities of the market, before we started to swing towards break-even then profitable deals for clients in the area of events, then in the area of media, on-line video. It was a company that ended in failure, and ended up being liquidated in December 2013, for various reasons, the main one being that within a very short space of time we suffered two or three very large financial setbacks, firstly an investment fund from a second-round fundraising campaign that went up in smoke 2 weeks before signing, something that I couldn't anticipate. Having no way to cover our arrears, this led to a gap in our accounts of almost 300, 400 thousand euros, and at the same time a tax audit, something that also happens to young Internet start-ups especially in R&D, which embroiled us in a battle that was much too fierce and inappropriate for a young company leader, a battle that was both political and fiscal-- because we had to file a class action lawsuit... Choices that were not at all strategic for the survival of the firm, which sapped all of my remaining strength and took every last minute of my time when it would have been wiser to tackle the actual substance, namely the market, customers, customers, customers. So it was a company I liquidated, that I had to liquidate in late 2013 as I was saying, with the feeling firstly that I'd made the right decision, that is, it was a painful decision because we were following a current whereby we had fought over this company for three years, with a team, extremely committed people. And obviously, when you make that decision, everything stops, not from one day to the next, you need some time to unravel the entire venture. So there were some fairly difficult months... but at the same time, so a decision that was calm... that was made... while being fully
aware of everything that I had the chance to learn from this venture. In other words, people often ask me, would you have liked to have done things differently. Practically speaking, you can't do things any differently, you learn by taking risks, you learn through practice, and of course tomorrow I'll start up again and I only want one thing: to start again with
that knowledge. But this is knowledge I would have never gained at business school, you have to practise it, experience it, it is both human learning, learning about legal situations that are nuanced and that you don't find in textbooks, situations of facing a client, deadlines, time scales that are much greater than you think, all of this is something you have to experience and I think it's through experience that you understand, you gauge the importance of various things that you may have read or learnt in a theoretical way. So obviously as I get back off the mark today, I am much better equipped, with no regrets for what I now see as my first lap round the entrepreneurial racetrack. As we come to the end of our chapter, I recommend that you talk about your idea as much as you can with those around you, rather than treating it as your little secret. It is through discussion with customers, beneficiaries and other people that you will improve your idea. A good idea is the result of feedback and step-by-step improvement. Sarah hit upon her idea at the Ticket for Change tour. I think she would agree with what I have just said. I wish you the best of luck with your prototype and hope you receive feedback that is just as enriching as the feedback that Sarah received. When you have listened to Sarah and the time comes for chapter 5, I wish you all the best with chapter 5. In the meantime, let's listen to what she has to say. I worked in a team, and it was seeing other people's perspectives that gained me confidence in my project because, in the end, I... I was persuaded by my project, but I didn't know how it was perceived by other people, and when I saw that they were enthusiastic and it also provided meaning, that it was also meaningful for them, I realised OK, it was a project that was maybe worth doing, first of all. Secondly, I worked with them, I fed off their vision for the project. We were given an important piece of advice during the Tour: when you have an idea, do not be reticent to talk about it, and I realised that this was really key. As for my project, I spoke about it a great deal with participants at the Tour and I remember a discussion I had with one of them, Adrien, who really pinpointed phases... well, points, strategic factors in my project that I hadn't seen, hadn't perceived. Talking with him enabled me to question my project to evolve it. And there you go, now I'm happy with my project and it is because I spoke to other people, because I confronted it from other people's perspectives that I was able to arrive at at a solution that I am now happy with.
