Figure out how to create a business doing the thing you love.

Lucas Carlson, CEO of @AppFog wrote a post titled How Do I Cope With Startup Envy? on medium. I read it and I think it is an amazing piece that all entrepreneurs should read.

Here is my favourite paragraph.

Fortunes come and go. Building startups is a long game. It is not long on money. You might win money in one startup, then invest it all and lose it the next startup. Startups are long on character. This is the dirty little secret nobody tells you up front: the spoils go to those left standing. By Lucas Carlson

Sometimes I feel the same too. I envied why other startups/entrepreneurs are performing better than me, especially the ones in the same space. Sometimes this feeling overwhelms me and I feel like a failure. Usually at these kind of moments, I would head out for a long run and clear my mind.

The things that are happening to others are external factors that I cannot control. So why do I have to get so frustrated about it? Instead I start to think why is xxx performing better than me? Why is yyy raising at a higher valuation than me? Is it because they have a better product? a better sales team? better growth hacking tactics?

As entrepreneurs, I believe we should be open-minded to learn from other people’s success and at the same time focus on the things that we can control. We can find out the things that others are doing better than us, learn and applied it within our context. I learn that by focusing on the things we can control and change, the result will indirectly affect the external factors.

And this also brings me to this week’s sharing, the bootstrapping myths.

• The change to products, and revenue from those products, happens quickly.
• It’s feels awesome to build a product.
• Luck is all that matters.

Bootstrapping myths

1. The Myth of the Design Studio Turned Product Company: @freshtilledsoil talks about how small design/dev shops get distracted by the success of 37Signals and the rush to become a product-focussed business. This rush in turns becomes a disillusion because building a product is f$%^ing hard.
2. 12 pieces of popular business advice to ignore in your bootstrapped startup: @thedannorris shares his views about the business advice that we are getting from business books or blogs and in his opinion most of it are BS.
3. There’s No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work: Unlike @freshtilledsoil, +allanbranch believes in the way of 37signals. It is possible to move from client services to products as a self-funded company, it is just very hard.
4. Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud: A collection of bootstrappers who are successful and making over $1M in revenues, curated by 37signals.
    
    p/s the myths I stated are all BS. Focus and hard work is all that matters.