I’ve been struggling with the direction of Enter Venture for a few weeks now.  At it’s outset, Enter Venture was designed to be about new entrepreneurs, web applications, events, books, etc. — anything that would help make the entrepreneurial process more transparent.

Recently, I’ve gotten away from that.  I’d gotten away from writing about tools and entrepreneurial ideas, and I became focused on writing the international startup series.  Now, I’ve really enjoyed the international startup series, but it’s become much larger and takes up much more time than I originally intended. (And in these dire/crisis/trying times, )  I think the size of the series is a great measure of the sophistication of the international startup scene, but it was eating up precious time and keeping me from focusing on what Enter Venture is all about. (And in this time of economic crisis, we need to prioritize)

Now, a post about feedback, that’s what Enter Venture’s all about.

It’s been said before that being an entrepreneur is all about soliciting and applying feedback. Refining an idea into a business is a constant struggle between trying something new, assessing the outcome, and trying it again.

Whatever you’re doing, no one’s done it before — not the exact thing, in the exact space, at the exact time.  Every entrepreneurial experience is different.  Take some of my recent entrepreneur interview series posts — ZDONK is working to leverage their industry connections in a way most outsiders couldn’t, Ativiti is working by moonlighting, and Baveo is working off of equity, without funding.  All three of these companies approaches the business creation process differently.

At best, someone can relate to your experience.  Someone can relate to your startup and offer ideas for how you can improve.  Some will even criticize your idea and startup.  You might not like the ideas; you might not like the opinions.  The key to being an entrepreneur, though, is your ability to consider all of these opinions and create an advantage out of their feedback.

When I was recently discussing this and Enter Venture with Dennis of ZDONK, he said:

“To be honest, I’ve really enjoyed all your posts but never really got into the international startup series. It seemed like you were kind of investigating and making a list as opposed to really getting into a particular startup or particular software/tools you thought would be useful for a startup. They were definitely interesting but personally I just wasn’t as engaged as I’d been with your previous posts.”

There it was.  I had created the series to try something new, but after a while, it was all that I was doing and alienated at least one of my regular readers.  After Dennis’ feedback and a recent Quick Sprout post about improving your blog by creating that helps people, rather than reports the news. I realized I was writing my own form of news.

You can expect that to change with Enter Venture because I’m mindful of your feedback.  (Feel free to leave it in my newly-updated, Disqus comment system).  I want to get a bit more into the entrepreneurial process and talk about the tools I use and the processes I go through to manage this blog.  I’ve re-organized Enter Venture a bit so there’s even a preliminary Resources section with everything from the blogs I read to WordPress plugins I use, tools, etc.

The entrepreneur interviews will continue — but as a way to illuminate the entrepreneurial process, not as a way of reporting the news.  We’ll save the news for TechCrunch, and the entrepreneur-relevant, feedback-incorporating blog evolution for Enter Venture.

What do you think?

Posted in Blogging, Entrepreneur, Ideas Comments