Iterate or pivot? Improving ideas with Jon Bradford

Future-Proof Your Career

In this episode of Future Proof Your Career we speak with Jon Bradford about iteration: how do you take an idea and improve on it?

Jon Bradford is co-founder & managing partner of Dynamo Ventures, an investment fund focused on supply chain and mobility. Jon is one of the most experienced early stage investors in Europe and launched the first accelerator bootcamp outside of the US in 2009. He went on to launch many more start-up programmes, earning him the title “Godfather of European Accelerators”.

Between this work and his own entrepreneurship, Jon has helped to refine many raw ideas into successful businesses, so he’s the ideal person to talk to us about this part of the creative process.

Here’s what we learned from Jon:

• Every proposal, every idea is a promise. You’ve got to make it and then deliver on it.
• Delivering a whole idea in one go is too much. Break any vision down into bite-sized pieces - each of which is a little ‘promise’ you can keep in its own right.
• At every ‘chunk’ there’s an opportunity to do things differently. Separate the objective from the approach.
• People should be measuring the progress of your project on ‘lines not dots’, as per this Mark Suster article. What they’re looking for is progress.
• Steer using feedback - and the most important feedback comes from your ‘customers’ - who will be buying or using your product/service?
• Your mum doesn’t count as a customer for feedback purposes. She probably isn’t objective.
• Constant feedback will allow you to make small changes frequently and not pursue blind alleys: ‘fail fast’, as the saying goes.
• Don’t be afraid to pivot though: make a radical change of direction. The highest potential team in Jon’s portfolio have done at least two major pivots.
• Make sure you set the bar for testing each stage of progress appropriately. Know what is a stretch goal, but don’t set your sights so low the test isn’t meaningful.
• Sometimes the problem isn’t the idea itself, it’s the market around it. Sometimes - as Tesla did - you have to build the ‘full stack’