The One Thing You Should Know about Starting a Business (or doing a startup)
I’ll get right to the point: It’s not glamorous and it’s not fucking easy.
You may have heard this before, but let me say it again just to really drive the point home.
Building a company is not glamorous and it’s not fucking easy.
I’m not successful, not yet anyway, so don’t feel like you have to trust me on this one, but you should trust everyone else that has already failed. The numbers are all over the place, 90% of startups fail. Money doesn’t seem to make it much better, 75% of venture backed startups fail.
Bloomberg says 80% of small businesses fail within the first 18 months. And that’s not tech startup stats, that’s small businesses as a whole.
Should this discourage you? Absolutely not. And it won’t, if you’re in it for the right reasons. If you think it’s gonna play out like a Steve Jobs biopic, you’re wrong. If you think you’re gonna be able to sit back and watch the dollars roll in, you’re not. If you think being “self-employed” means you get to take a vacation whenever you want, it doesn’t.
So why do it? Because you can’t NOT do it. It may fail, but you’ll learn from the failure. You’ll be at it again soon enough with another idea, and maybe, hopefully, eventually, you’ll figure it out, or the stars will align and you’ll have a successful business.
And then reality will set in again and you’ll be fighting to keep the business going, but you’re not alone. That’s everyone that’s every played the game. You push the boulder up the hill, and the fight to not let it roll back down the other side.
Here’s what I’ve learned and what I’ve always known: Work your ass off. There is no secret, nobody is going to help you–it’s on you, and the team you put together. And if anybody says you’re working too hard, well then you’ll know you’re doing it right.
