The Dumb Luck Strategy

It’s great to get lucky, unless you have no idea what to do next.

“Everybody knows that you get knifed in a dark alley.”

At the beginning of the summer of 2014, Elizabeth Glazer was the director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.

“There had been a shooting spike in the city, concentrated in public housing. Of all the things that absolutely could not be permitted to happen in the first year of Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty, a rise in violent crime was at the top of the list,” she says in this story for Vital City.

It’s a story about using evidence in policy design. One would assume policymakers do, right? We all know they should.

But sometimes, policymakers don’t have the evidence. Because research on that scale requires substantial variation to get “a result reliable enough to prove or disprove the idea that lighting reduces crime.”

Yet, policymakers need to act or they lose public trust. So they acted and got the results they expected: a massive research showed that lighting resulted in nighttime major felony crime dropping by 36%.

Reading this article, one could assume that we don’t really need an evidence-backed plan. That if more people acted in line with the “everybody knows” school of thought, we’d get better, faster results.

I call this “the dumb luck strategy.”

Solopreneurs love the dumb luck strategy.

I’d argue it’s the most used strategy in solopreneurship, and for good reasons.

When you rely on intuition and “everybody knows” thinking, you:

• Launch fast.

• Stumble into opportunities you can’t discover with research.

• Pivot quickly. There’s no plan, no emotional investment, (almost) no money investment, so if it doesn’t work, you just move on.

• You get “trail and error” operational experience, which can be valuable.

• You get momentum. When you do things, you’re more likely to do more things.

• You get connected. When you’re active online, you get noticed and opportunities for collaboration arise.

The dumb luck strategy is also the most sold strategy online. Most courses you buy are based on just that: someone tried a bunch of things, got lucky, and now they’re showing you how they did it.

Strange, no? Yet, we’re still ready to buy anything that promises to make our dreams come true and sounds but a little believable.

Despite all its positives, the dumb luck strategy is still dumb.

And I’m saying this as someone who, of course, has built her solo business on the dumb luck strategy.

Because what else was out there 11 years ago? What else is out there even now?

It’s all people who try to convince you that THAT’s the way to go—and when I read articles where even the director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice counts on this, it seems pretty obvious.

But it’s exactly the dumb luck strategy that keeps you small.

Because it:

• Isn’t sustainable. You’ve struck a trend, gotten viral on a platform, found that your product is exactly what people want—but things move quickly. In one year when that platform / trend / product dies away, what do you do?

• Is highly competitive. The problem with doing things “everybody knows” is that everybody does them. So now you compete with everybody. Good luck!

• Wastes your resources. You’re basically saying “I’ll just throw as much as I can on the wall and see what sticks.” That's a lot of wasted energy, money and time for things that most probably won’t stick.

• Isn’t scalable. Because most solopreneurs who get lucky don’t know how they got lucky so they can’t do it again and they can’t grow it. Just because a lightning struck and started a fire, it doesn’t mean you know how to build one.

And even in policy, as soon as they decided to act on intuition, they made sure to use the moment to get a research done that offers conclusive proof.

This way, when the team needs to address crime in another area; or when someone else needs to address crime, they have the evidence to act.

So what’s the alternative?

If you want the detailed answer, the alternative is that you take the time to develop a solid solo business strategy, which I’ll show you how to do in the Smarter Solopreneur Strategy program that’s coming on 8th of July.

But even if you don’t want to be a part of it, at least do this:

• Think about what’s the core of your offer.

• Think about what you want to achieve long term.

• Think about how the core of your offer can get you to your long term goals. If it can’t, adjust.

• It’s okay to make educated assumptions, but look for ways to prove or disprove them as fast as possible (like Elizabeth Glazer did with her lighting assumption).

• Dumb luck can still happen: make the best of it without letting it completely overhaul your business. You can add a trendy offer to your existing one, pivot slightly to accommodate a new group of people, or present the trend you found through the looking glass of your overall strategy.

In short, instead of counting on dumb luck:

• Incorporate educated assumptions into your smart strategy

• Plan your reaction to a lucky find ( a trend, a new platform, a viral piece of content) from the start so you don’t get completely off track.

Now that we’re clear, I wish you good luck.

Till next time,

Maya