The NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge has been really fun and an amazing resource! In particular, the two day-long bootcamps that we’ve participated in have been great opportunities to meet past entrepreneurs who have been in our shoes and to receive guidance on a path that is otherwise filled with uncertainty. Throughout our time building Eden we’ve been through every emotion: excited, frustrated, confident, tired. The experience of being founders has given us countless lessons to draw on. However, the most important lesson our team has learned is that you always have to be ready to adapt.

No matter what industry you’re in, what product you’re building, who your team is, or how much money you have, you are bound to encounter hardships along your journey. This became all too clear to us one day early on in our process when we’d been iterating on a product direction that we thought was really going to take off. We’d spoken to numerous customers, began building a prototype, and were feeling very confident about our direction. However, while browsing LinkedIn we suddenly came across a post from a company who we’d been keeping tabs on as a potential competitor. To our shock, they’d just announced a new feature coming soon to their platform that was very similar to what we were currently building. That confidence we had coming into that day was shook and it felt like we’d hit a tremendous roadblock.

Of course, we had to get back on our feet. After some reflection, we realized that this news did not need to be bad news. Although one implementation of our idea was being developed by another larger company, we reframed our thinking to understand that this was a form of free validation—we identified a real problem customers are having that other companies want to solve! The key was to be adaptable and to use our unique insights from customer interviews to build a product more in-tune to our specific users’ needs. As Greg Isenberg said in a recent LinkedIn post.