The Startup hustle
About 9 months ago, I started a web studio called Fusion with a partner friend of mine called, Yomi Eluwande. I honestly just started the company because the skills we both had the time fit perfectly into what we were trying to do, as well as I had no insane idea for a tech startup at the time.
Things started out quite interesting, really interesting. We got our first official client just after a week of starting. The client wanted an e-commerce store for his fashion brand. We were excited aka startup thrill. As if that wasn’t enough, it seemed like the odds were in our favor (or so we thought), a couple of follow-up emails sent from potential clients and it seemed like we were about to wrap two additional clients the following week. I remember Yomi saying to me “This entrepreneurship thing is easy” and I couldn’t agree more, I mean we were about to have three paying clients just within a period of two weeks after launching. What could be easier than that?
but /bʌt,bət/
noun:
an argument against something; an objection.
As with most Nigerian clients and parents too (unapologetic) there’s always a but or a comma or a full-stop. Just something that kills your joy (startup joy in this case) and makes your excitement short-lived. These “potential” clients started backing out, giving all sort of excuses. I remember exchanging tons of calls and emails with one particular client, and yet a deal couldn’t fall through.
Few months later and a ton of frustrating rejection emails after, our notion of “easy entrepreneurship” started to change. Yomi plans on publishing an article tagged “Why I don’t want to be an Entrepreneur”, the usual way of captioning a Medium (silicon’s valley Newspaper) post that’s going to be a hit. They usually start this way, “5 ways to do X in order to be Y” or “Why I don’t want to be a Human being”. You get the drift.
However, as with most startups and businesses, there are ups and downs. After several downs, we started experiencing progress. Few clients and several projects to our name. Business is booming in *DJ Khaled’s voice*
These are some of the few lessons I’ve learnt so far in this startup hustle;
1. Entrepreneurship is hustle. It’s nothing more, it’s nothing less. Sure, it’s solving problems and creating opportunities and providing value. In the grand scheme of things, what you’re actually doing is hustling.
- To solve problems, you have to hustle.
- To create opportunities, you have to hustle.
- To make money, you have to hustle.
If you’re not prepared to hustle, maybe you should consider doing something else, definitely not entrepreneurship. Eric Ries once said “Startup is like religion, you first see and believe, then you have to convince others to believe.”
How do you convince others to believe, if you’re not ready to hustle?
2. Your Team is everything. I can’t overemphasize this enough. While I handled the Business development side as well as client relationship, Yomi handled the development. Every Project we’ve done today was a HIT from IfeanyiNwune to Fadareak to DAC because of Yomi’s technical skills.
Your team members’ skills should complement one another. Not everybody has to be a Programmer or Coder. Startup is more than just code. They don’t necessarily need to have the best educational qualification (Pearson Specter Litt), as long as they have the necessary skills and the “hustle” mentality.
Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships
Michael Jordan
You want to win the Startup game? Bring the best team to the Startup Pitch (no pun intended). There’s a reason Barcelona FC is the best football club in the world today.
3. There’s a stark contrast between actually reading about something and doing that same very thing. The kind of excitement I got from reading startup materials from books to blogs to interview with startup founders, wasn’t the same kind of excitement I experienced while “doing” a startup. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE startups. But reading about them was more fun than actually doing one.
“The best way to learn is by doing”. If you want to learn about something, start by doing first and along the line start applying what you’ve learnt from relevant materials. Develop a framework for your own learning, consistent with principles and lessons acquired from other people’s experience.
4. In Entrepreneurship, there are no manuals. When we started out, I was actually looking for a book to tell me what to do step by step. How stupid. Sure, there are books and blogs about entrepreneurship. But, all these are guidelines or lessons that you have to infer from.
Someone that wrote a book about running a business in USA, might not be all useful to someone running a business in Nigeria.
You just have to forge ahead trusting your instincts and guts, as well as your creative tank (pray that it never runs out).
9 months later and these are some of the lessons I’ve learnt. I hope to learn more as the journey continues.
*Pearson Specter Litt: is a fictional law firm in the TV series, Suits, that employs only Harvard graduates.