When we start a new business or organization, whether it's for-profit or nonprofit business, we will almost certainly be committing to many years of work and learning if we are successful in what we do.
That's why my biggest advice to anyone starting something new is to choose who you serve first, not the problem you want to solve.
We can see that the people we work with as colleagues are going to be very important, since we will likely spend more waking time with them than even our spouses or romantic partners. We should put the same level of thought into selecting the people who we're hoping to impact with our work, learning about their lives, experiences, and what makes them amazing, resourceful, and inspiring.
If we don't have this feeling of connection with the people we serve, we are likely to slowly dehumanize them into "our" *users* or *customers*, as though their lives revolve around our products or services. This is not only gross but also reduces our opportunity to build something meaningful and innovative. We are much more likely to be successful if we start from a place of empathy and wonder.
When we begin with a problem, we assume that our solutions matter.
When we start with humans, we discover the nuances around how they think about problems, alternatives to solving the problem, and what and who else factors into their decisions. We are much more likely to think holistically and less likely to ignore the possible unintended consequences a narrow solution might produce.
We're also more likely to understand how to position our product or service, what natural partnerships are available, and how much potential there is for what we do to make an impact.
Many people believe when they start something that they can serve everyone. I have rarely seen products being deeply meaningful to a small group of people as a barrier to being valuable for more people. The inverse is much more challenging, being potentially sort-of meaningful to a large number of potential people, having a lot of different kinds of early users who have no real connection or common goal.
When we start something new, we often feel quite sensitive about it because we're conceiving of our business as a proxy for our own worth, our own intelligence, our own competence. If people around us judge what we're doing, we may feel discouraged or feel personally critiqued.
But a business is not an art project. It's not something we do in our basement for years, honing our skills. Sometimes our products are our art projects, and those are pretty challenging businesses, though they can be super rewarding when your main motive is just to be able to make more art, to continue the creative journey.
The business itself, though, is a relationship with the people who benefit from it, and it's one where being a good listener and observer makes us much more effective than any particular creative brilliance. Our relationships matter more than anything else we do outside ourselves. This approach helps us understand ourselves, our own needs, assumptions, and biases, and to open the door to a loving connection with the work we do.
Extra! Extra!
B. Pagels-Minor on The Drops Podcast
B. Pagels-Minor & Gabrielle Union at Lesbians Who Tech Pride Summit