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It’s an epidemic out there in the entrepreneurial world.
Anyone out there suffering from CAPS (Customer Acquisition Procrastination Syndrome)? Symptoms include the eager urge to work on ANYTHING and EVERYTHING except finding customers to build a new business. Your doctor (or mentor) doesn’t need to tell you that building a business is contingent on finding paying customers, yet new entrepreneurs often dive into the more fun, less important tasks first!
Here is a list of symptoms that show that you may be suffering from CAPS. If you are an entrepreneur that has done any of these before or instead of finding customers, you may need intervention:
- Are you tackling social media completely manually? Or consuming it constantly?
- Do you have a constant, burning urge to check your stats: Facebook likes, Twitter followers, email list subscribes and unsubscribes.
- Do you find yourself running errands ALL. THE. TIME?
- Are you bogged down by clerical tasks instead of growing your business?
- Did you find and rent a fancy office space, before you had clients?
- Are you on a hiring binge – before you have actual work for the new talent?
- Did you throw a red carpet launch party, before actually finding a customer?
- Are you spending all day browsing email newsletters, reading blogs, watching videos, and skimming books?
- Did you work months creating a fancy logo, slick business cards and a fancy feature-and-content-filled website before you were certain about the product you were offering and the customer you were offering it to?
- Are you letting daily stimuli sway your day instead of spending the day focusing on building actual leads and customers?
- Are you feverishly attending random networking events in the hopes you will meet the right people that may help spread the word about your business?
The only cure for this severe ailment is to find your first paying customer! And after that, rinse and repeat as often as you can, every day.
Have you procrastinated in finding a customer? Please share your experiences in the comments below!
This was originally posted by Kriti Vichare on #entrepreneurfail: Startup Success.