The first design will be too complicated

Actually the first two or three will as well but lets start at the beginning. When designing a system you may think that you’ve got the base basics listed in for your version 1, but you won’t have.  Your absolute necessities will turn out to be either ‘nice to have’ or more likely ‘nobody really wants that anyway’.   That only comes to light when half of them don’t work and all your time is taken up trying to fix them.

Absolutely the same in business.  It’s OK to start with a plan but nearly every product range, course content, event launch is absolutely too complicated. Nobody will understand it because neither do you.  Your customers (or lack of them) will tell you. 

Lesson- Always keep it simple then make it simpler.

Kanban or scrum are not just for software.

Honestly I knew this, but applying it feels odd, especially if you are a team of one.  For those who don’t know (and most don’t)  these are project management methodologies within the agile world. Very simplified explanation here as there are big books on the topic. 

With scrum you work in set time frames (e.g a month) called a sprint.  The goals are decided at the start of the sprint with an estimate of the work involved.  You never add work into a sprint without taking something the same size out. 

With Kanban you limit your work on progress items. You don’t start something new until you have fully cleared something from your current stack.

When it comes to running your own business it’s often tempting to think you can add one more thing in.  One more event, One more social media platform.  Start writing a blog, build an email list and send ‘just one’ email a week.  Soon none of it is manageable and none of it is fully ‘done’.  And you remember that agile is heavily tied to a ‘definition of done’ as ‘potentially shippable’.  A half written and  never posted blog, an unsent but time critical email are both as good as never done.  Just as a feature that had lots of code written but failed testing and nobody has time to fix will be going nowhere

Lesson - Stop trying to do it all and get to know how long things take. You can do more by extending your team, automation, or the right training but know these will initially add time before it gets better.

Secondary thought. - There is a scrum master whose job is to remove impediments to the team’s progress. 

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Data and information are not the same thing

Systems hold loads of data. Names, dates, codes, prices.  But if the people who need it cant see it and don’t know how to use it then its not information. For example if there is a number 20250716  that could be an order number, a date or the number of people who have hit submit on a form.  The questions asked by software designers include what is this for, where is it going and how are people going to use it?  Also a golden rule - don’t hold the same thing in multiple places because they go out of sync - and then who knows what’s the right one?

The data you are likely to gather as you build a business isn’t’ just what’s in a system.  It’s all the training courses you did for free.  The downloads you never read. The notes you made about the hundreds of people you met on the way .  It only becomes information if you can and do, access it and use it.  Some of it will become ingrained in your knowledge but most will simply fill files, notebooks and your online storage. Never to be read again, existing in multiple forms from multiple gurus, out of date, conflicting with each other and unaligned to who you are. 

Lesson - most of what we hold is data not information.  Delete what serves no purpose as it will only slow the system (YOU) down  

I’m sure there’s more but for now perhaps this helps someone who’s also trying to navigate the world of building a business for the first time.