Earlier this week, London startup GoCardless officially launched to the world. Recipient of a $1.5 million round led by Accel Partners, Passion Capital, SV Angel, Start Fund, and Y Combinator, GoCardless offers an innovative payments solution to small businesses. Founder Matt Robinson, a 24 year old Oxford graduate and former McKinsey consultant turned entrepreneur, was kind enough to take time out from his hectic schedule to share some thoughts on the challenges of starting up.

I think that one of the best things we’ve done as a startup is to take a “Valley” approach. From the start we’ve tried to adopt the best practices (sorry to slip back into consultese) from the startup world: Lean Startup Methodology, Agile Development, Customer Development. Sound familiar?

I hope so, because they all make a huge amount of sense. The only problem is that in that last paragraph, “tried”, is the operative word. We knew we should be building our MVP; that we should be iterating quickly; that we should be metric driven; and that we should implement customer development. Eric Ries told us so. So did Steve Blank. And they made it sound so obvious. Which it is. But they also made it sound so easy. Which it really isn’t.

We failed miserably to build our MVP (see “Why you should not be building a Minimum First Version”), we’re still not as metric driven as we’d like to be, and our efforts at customer development have been arrested at best.

And that brings me to the nub of this post: it’s all very well reading about all of these brilliant methodologies, but it’s something else entirely to implement them. And you know what? That’s alright.

The point of knowing this stuff is not to stop you from making mistakes in the first place. You have to make your own mistakes. The point is that it’s only by exposing yourself to the smartest people and the best practices that you’ll realise they’re mistakes.

Matt regularly blogs about his experiences running a startup at mattjackrob.com and you can follow him on Twitter @MattJackRob.

GoCardless makes it extremely cheap and easy for merchants to collect payments online. They’re a fast-growing 1 year old London based company backed by some of the world’s leading investors. They are looking for talented, ambitious people to join the team in building a global business – if you think you might fit the bill drop them a line at [email protected].