8 Insights From Genevieve Ryan Bellaire of App Startup Realworld
Last Updated: By TRUiC Team
Genevieve Ryan Bellaire, the founder of the “adulting” app and startup Realworld, has learned a litany of valuable insights during her time as a college student, professional, and entrepreneur. Fortunately, Bellaire and the team at Realworld are dedicated to using their experiences to support and empower those around them. Here are the most impactful insights from our interview with Realworld Founder Genevieve Ryan Bellaire.
1. Get Startup Experience First
“Go work at another company first. Think about what you would do differently or what you'd replicate. There's no better way to learn than sitting front row!”
2. Validate Your Idea, Then Build
“Over-index on customer discovery. Before we built anything, I spoke to over 1000 young adults, their parents, professors, hiring manager, career coaches, etc., to determine exactly what the problem was at scale. Those insights are still so valuable and gave me 100% confidence that this is a real problem worth solving. Validate as much as you can before you build anything.”
3. Find Great People to Work With
“Find great people to work with. Not only will it make your business better, but it will be more fun to build.”
4. Focus Is Key
“Focus is key, and making time for deep work has proven crucial to staying true to our strategic vision for the future. I have also learned to be metrics/data-driven, tying everything I do directly to an outcome.”
5. Trust Your Gut
“I've learned to trust my own gut — no one know[s] the business better than my team, and I do, and while many people are quick to offer advice, it's important to trust our own vision and go with what we believe to be the best for the company.”
6. You Need to Be Excited About What Your Startup Is Doing
“[I]f you're going to spend … years of your life dedicated to building something, just make sure it's something you really care about because it will be [an] all-encompassing thing, and you need to get yourself excited about it.”
7. Don’t Just Write a Business Plan, Test the Pieces of Your Plan
“I was told by other entrepreneurs that, [in] this day and age, business plan[s] are, kind of, a waste of your time, your time should be spent on testing all these different pieces of your plan. Your plan is going to change over time if you're building anything innovative.”
8. Success Doesn’t Happen Overnight
“I think [before launching Realworld] I wish someone would have said, it is very non-linear to actually build a meaningful company and it doesn't happen overnight ... I think the reality is when you talk to entrepreneurs who've been successful or even people who are sort of still in the process of building, and oftentimes you really only hear the highlights, you don't hear about all of the late nights, all of the challenges, the fails, the two steps forward, two steps back type of just process that it takes to actually build something new.”
Next Steps
- Check out Realworld’s origin story and ways to support them!
- Keep up with more startup companies by following Startup Savant on Google News!
- Start your own startup by reading our guide on how to start a startup.
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