I interviewed Joanna on a cloudy Thursday morning in Melbourne – but in Bend, Oregon where she resides it was a sunny Wednesday afternoon!  I was really privileged to hear Joanna’s story – not just because she reached out to me from the USA – because she shared what she learned from her experience of stepping out of her comfort zone. 

Joanna found herself a successful lawyer on the track toward partnership, living in a wonderful place. “I was a top young antitrust associate in terms of popularity and the go-to person. I was in Silicon Valley. I was literally walking down pretty streets and basking in the wonderful weather down there.” But despite of that and, for a variety of reasons, “I wanted to leave and do something different.” 

Initially Joanna went to grad school and ended up being an urban/environmental planner. “This new career was so at odds with what I had to bring to the table. I ended up jumping back into the law.  I worked in a certain area of law that exposed me to regulations around safer consumer products.” 

Joanna was inspired to start a software company around those regulations as a result. Due to a number of reasons, her start-up struggled and over a number of years it slowly wound down. “I was building a compliance tool and relying on regulations that had already been passed and I never anticipated that they would politically collapse and implode on themselves; as a result, I had to reinvent our compliance tool as a sustainability tool. And at some point we just ran out of steam as a team to keep pushing forward.” 

Joanna went through some really difficult times. “Some bad news would hit just I was scheduled to go present to a big audience and I was just feeling as if physically my body was turning to ice or stone.  At the time, I did not know how to deal with that.” 

Out of the experience Joanna had some really great insights. She discovered she was most interested in the customer discovery aspects of entrepreneurship “in terms of understanding your customer and using customer insights to inform the whole entrepreneurial process including your products, your marketing content, and your business strategy. And so I started focusing on that. And through that process, I started to really understand that my techniques of customer discovery were the key.” 

Her learning was not limited to developing her own customer discovery techniques, Joanna also took time to really look at her mindset: “I was really unpacking what was going on with me emotionally. I mean, there were so many layers of shame going on. There I was, coming from this successful law background, and in my view I had failed. And failure is always relative, always subjective. There are people who have made millions who consider themselves failures and kind of disappear in a hole. So it’s very subjective. And I also started to figure out that so much of what I was capable of doing at any given moment was very much driven by my emotional body. What I have packed in, what I had learned to internalize, what I assumed about myself and the world. Over time, it almost became like this revelation about having the right mindset.  If you’re an entrepreneur, you really have to have this entrepreneurial mindset that allows you to tap into what’s going on with yourself, what fears you have any in any given time. And rather than do what we all do (which is to shove that emotion away as quickly as possible), it’s actually [important] to steep in it on a very physical level. Physically feel the churning in your stomach, the burning around your heart, etc. And so that’s been a big part of what I’ve been focusing on and sharing with other entrepreneurs to help them become successful.” 

Joanna believes that flexibility is the key, and that the most successful people in school and as employees are often the ones who find it hardest to cope with failure as entrepreneurs. They are not emotionally prepared. Joanna herself thinks that she should have let herself feel the anguish she was experiencing as she pivoted her start-up, instead of bottling it up. Hiding from the feelings let the problems drag on. 

And what has Joanna done with all this amazing experience and insight? “I started a consulting firm—DESi Potential (desipotential.com)–to help emerging companies and innovators gain market traction, do the customer discovery, and figure out what’s going on with their mindset. Some of the startups I work with are much more advanced; many have been around for three years, five years, even 10 years, but they’re still sorting stuff out. And that’s what I help people with – sorting that stuff out in terms of the product and the customer in their market fit. Using what I learned, my own experience to help [them] avoid the same pitfalls. After my personal experience, I can really see it in people’s faces and behavior when they are struggling in certain areas. You can totally relate because you’ve seen it in yourself and your peers. And then once you see it in yourself, you see it in a whole bunch of people.” 

For other people thinking about stepping out of their comfort zone, Joanna had an interesting point of view. She thinks that “entrepreneurs and innovators tend to be more comfortable with risk and with new stuff; however, society in general tends to be more risk averse and more ingrained in their habits. It is important to understand these differences and how they play out when you’re talking to prospective customers.  This means really understanding their lives, their motivations, their habits, and where things are risky and uncomfortable for them.  And I think that a lot of entrepreneurs don’t have a sense of that because they’re more willing to try new things while the majority of society is not.” 

And a last piece of excellent advice:  

“Be proactive before you invest your energy, your time, your resources, whatever it is. Go out and validate and ask questions. We have this view of overnight millionaires, as if entrepreneurship and risk-taking are like playing Russian Roulette or the lotto. They are not. The majority of risk taking is not about taking blind risks. You need to lower the risk for yourself. And turn your efforts into a much more organic growth process by going out and asking questions to validate your assumptions. And a lot of times we are hesitant to do that. We just kind of assume things instead.  We are hesitant to ask other people about things because we are afraid of looking like we don’t know. And sometimes we don’t ask because we don’t want to really hear the answer or are scared to hear the answer. But you have to do these things even if they scare you. Not for the purpose of sticking your head out. But for the purpose of getting the information you need to make a decision about what is the next right thing for you to do.” 

Very wise advice!  Thank you Joanna. 

Joanna Malaczynski founded DESi Potential, a consulting firm that helps innovative and emerging companies gain market traction.  Her work focuses on helping her clients understand their customer and develop an entrepreneurial mindset.  She brings 15 years of experience in analytical and creative thinking techniques to her work, drawing upon her background in entrepreneurship, economics, law, planning, sustainability and design.  Learn more at www.desipotential.com.