Learning from the common mistakes other people make

Building a business involves a lot of learning.
It means making a lot of mistakes. But if we budget time and money to make mistakes, we can get passed obstacles and build a business.
Another way is to look at other people's mistake, and try to avoid them.
I hope this can help you identify new things you can tweak in your business approach.
I have been building websites for years, and have spent the past 5 years doing so exclusively with Thrive Themes. More than 200 projects later, I have made and seen a lot of mistakes being made, especially when we are starting a new project.
In this post, I share the common mistakes that I see the most so you can avoid some of them, or go past them more quickly.
Watch the video above.
Look below for the slides and leave a comment or a question.
Thrive Themes Websites
200+
New Businesses
vs
Established Businesses
50/50
Why some people succeed?
Why some people struggle?
5 Common mistakes
The 5 common mistakes
Describing what they do
Hard ideas
Not budgeting for learning
Generating money
Time & focus
Mistake #1.
Can't explain what they do clearly
- People won't buy if they don't understand
- Keep refining it your messaging.
- Solution: Practice whenever you can.
Thrive Themes has a lot of features, but it doesn't do everything, and it's not a perfect tool either.
Every tool has its limitation and every software has bugs. This is the reality of the software world, and accepting that reality helps a lot.
Tools often rely on other tools, and keeping things simple and compatible helps a lot in reducing costs.
Mistake #2.
Going after hard ideas
- Going after hard niches
- Going after competitive niches
- Not focusing on getting their first clients
- Solution: Start with a smaller niche or targeted initial campaign, focus on getting your first clients.
Mistake #3.
Not budgeting for learning, help, advice or feedback
- People work alone on their business
- Lots of people only asking questions about tools
- Solution: Work with other people and ask for feedback as much as you can
Automatic Email, PDF downloads, video courses sent by emails are great, but they take time to build.
You can keep that step in Phase 2 of your website by simply configuring Thrive Leads to send you an email notification when someone submits a form on your website. You can even automate it and receive an SMS.
Manual interaction is extremely effective and can be a very good way of engaging people. See this example of me sending a first video to someone, it took only a few minutes to record, and makes it for a very engaging first email.
Mistake #4.
Not Generating Money
- Not knowing where or how to find clients.
- Not knowing the cost of complexity.
- Not budgeting for mistakes and waste.
- Spending money on tools only.
- Not investing in paid support, courses, coaching, freelancers.
- Solution: Simplify and engage with potential clients.
Mistake #5.
Time Budgeting
- Focusing on tools, design, automation, testing and not on business
- Not knowing there are often easier ways, alternative ways or later ways
- Not seeing the big picture
- Forgetting the value of our skills and knowledge.
- Solution: Learn about business, make a plan and get support
Hi, nice article but I’m looking for info about the speed of WordPress theme made with thrive architect and also about the SEO friendliness.
Hi Michael. Thanks for commenting. In terms of speed, do you have any specific goals in terms of load time, concerns or requirements in mind?
For the SEO, the output of Thrive Themes and Thrive Architect is pretty standard html and css. Of course like with any tools, you have to know the tools and format your pages properly in terms of Headers and paragraphs. If you have specific questions, hopefully I can be of help.
Denis
The search results show weird codes for this page in google search results. This seems to be related to the thrive theme or architect you are using in this website.
I was searching for thrive theme optimization where I found this link in google results.
Could you please confirm if this is related to thrive and should we avoid using thrive products?
Hi Nitesh,
I have noticed on this post the URL that contained some code like this
https://www.thrivemate.com/%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B7-%E2%80%8Bmistakes-avoid-using-thrive-themes/
Thanks for letting me know.
I suspect the problem to come pasting the title of the headline from another source. I just fixed the problem by renaming the “slug” in wordpress.
That’s is no related to thrive themes, has the slug and page title is handled by WordPress.
If you have other questions about Thrive Themes, let me know, would love to help.