Are you ready to be an entrepreneur?

I know you think it’s cool to be an entrepreneur, that it’s nice and easy. You don’t have a boss to tell you what to do, you can get up late and you can start a company very fast: you have that great idea in your mind, you think you will develop an application or a website that will have million of users from the first day and you won’t need to work for the rest of your life. That’s a nice dream but it’s not going to happen. It’s ok to DREAM BIG but at some point you should get up and start working on your dream.

Being an entrepreneur is hard, it’s a 24/7 job, you have to work every single day to make your dream come true. There are no excuses, no holidays and there is no such thing as free time.
If you have a job or if you are a freelancer, think about what you are doing now, as being your product, make it your dream, your startup. Work hard, do overtime hours, be curious, do research in your free time.
If you can’t work this hard for 6 months and be paid for it, you will not survive as an entrepreneur because being an entrepreneur means that you will not have a fixed income or an income at all.

If money motivates you then your place is not in a startup, not even as developer. You should try your luck in a big corporation.
Being an entrepreneur means that you will have to bootstrap. If you are worried about your monthly financials, it’s time to panic because bootstrapping means reducing your costs to almost $0 and survive with water, air and lot of optimism.

So, what do you think? Are you ready to spend your next years working very hard? Are you ready to work without having a fixed income each month? Are you ready to do everything? Write code, do marketing, sales, business development, talk to your customers and partners? Are you ready to get out from your comfort zone? Are you ready to work at the same peace even when you are successful?
Being an entrepreneur it’s a continuous job. You have to stay in front of your competitors, you have to think about new competitive advantages, you have to make the gap between you and them insurmountable. You have to keep a focus on continued and accelerating growth.

As an entrepreneur you have to be open minded, you can’t be always right and you have to be able to change your mind very easy. You should be ready to do lots of experiments, get feedback from your users and change your product fast.

Are you ready to fail? Can you get back on your feet and start again fast enough? These are the questions that you have to answer yourself before starting a business.

Almost every day someone asks me: if it’s so hard why do you continue? How can you survive without an income?
It’s really simple. I believe in what I’m doing, I work very hard to make it happen and every day I find a new source of energy that gives me the power to continue and be focused.

Unless you have a brilliant idea or enough money to survive for 1 year, it will be damn hard to make it happen.
Prepare yourself for a long journey with ups and downs at every hour, lots of coffee, more work and no time for your personal activities but make sure you celebrate important milestones from time to time.