Visible vs answerable: six ways your count breaks.
The visible vs answerable test is what keeps your column honest. A live website nobody was sent to is public, but nobody can answer it. Six common mistakes inflate your count, and the last one feels exactly like progress.
Friends, crowds and locked doors.
First, your column may fill with friends who were always going to be kind. So cross them out, and accept a zero as a finding. Second, you may write "the market" or "my audience". If you cannot name one person to contact this week, the row is blank.
Third, you may count an unanswerable act, like a website nobody visits or eleven followers. In short, visible vs answerable decides it, and answerable wins.
The unfinished product excuse.
Fourth, you may call the exercise unfair because your product is not finished. However, recall the 1996 sample, where building a prototype separated quitters from those still trying. Building has its place, but it is not what you lack. So waiting until the product is ready is often just more of what you already have plenty of.
Fifth, you may feel the drop and go back to preparing tomorrow. Therefore, put a date against the first blank row before you close the book.
Why visible vs answerable exposes later.
Sixth, you may decide your column will be full soon, just not today. That sentence has no date anywhere in it. From where you sit, a plan to be seen later equals never being seen. Also, it feels exactly like progress, which is why it lasts for years unnoticed. That is the trap of mistaking preparation for progress. Still, nothing on your list was wasted, because it was real work done where nothing could come back.
Apply visible vs answerable to every row tonight.
Cross out friends and abstractions, then recount only names who could have said no.
Write a date beside your first blank row and treat it like someone else's deadline.
From the book.
You count an act that was visible but unanswerable. A live website nobody was ever sent to, a company registered at a government office, a social account with eleven followers, and every one of those is public in exactly the sense that a locked door is public. Visible is not the test here. Answerable is.
I Want to Start a Business but I Never Actually Start, chapter 3: What counts as started
Questions about visible vs answerable.
What does visible vs answerable mean for my column?
A thing can be public yet unable to receive a reply, like a locked door. Only acts that someone outside could answer belong in your count.
Why does a plan to be seen later equal never?
The plan has no date, so from where you sit it looks identical to never being seen. It also feels like progress, which keeps it hidden.
Was my preparation wasted?
No, all of it was real work. However, nearly all of it happened where no answer could come back.
Read the whole chapter.
This lesson covers one section of chapter 3, “What counts as started”. The book goes further, with the full evidence, the stories and every exercise.
Lessons in this chapter.
- 01 Nobody has seen my business: the question to ask.
- 02 Who has seen my business idea: fill in one column.
- 03 Correlation vs causation in startups: what survives.
- 04 Nascent entrepreneurs study: what 71 people did.
- 05 First online sale story: eleven minutes, fifteen dollars.
- 06 Stealth mode startup: why it is not hiding.
- 07 Visible vs answerable: six ways your count breaks.