Start with one.

Published in

Becoming An Entrepreneur

3 min readFeb 5, 2016

So it’s very easy to get caught up in the hype of other people bragging about 6-figure launches, gaining 10,000 followers or subscribers, and other seemingly fantastic achievements.

Whilst there’s definitely a place for these types of activities, in my experience launching a new business or passion project that makes a difference can already be an overwhelming exercise.

Start with ONE pitch…

In 2012, whilst I was volunteering teaching at Sunshine School Laos, I watched a TED talk that really inspired me. The talk was about one amazing woman’s belief that “I CAN” are the two most powerful words in a child’s vocabulary — and when adults support children to believe in their own ability to change the world — they will.

Kiran Bir Sethi, the person who gave the talk, had created a children’s empowerment program based on design thinking principles. She called it “Design for Change” (DFC) and her program had already made an impact to hundreds of schools in India, and she wanted to take the project global.

Watch Kiran’s TED talk now:

I had a lightbulb moment — what if I brought DFC to Laos?!

Start with ONE person…

So I pitched the idea to Didi Gaori, the director of Sunshine school.

Didi loved the idea and soon we were going to launch Design For Change Laos!

With Didi on my side as supporter/co-founder/cheerleader and also someone influential who could help spread the word about what we were doing, I felt confident that we could do something great together.

Both of us felt an initial thrill and excitement about bringing the global project to Laos, and we were super excited that our school Sunshine School was going to be leading it.

Soon our excitement turned to complete overwhelm when we thought about how the heck two people i.e. us, who were both already working full-time at the school, could really create the impact that we wanted. We wanted other schools to join in and empower hundreds, maybe thousands, of school children and teachers in Laos.

The other challenge that we had was time — I was leaving Laos in 7 weeks so we only had 5 weeks to implement.

Then we had a skype call with DFC Founder Kiran Bir Sethi and she said something that has stuck with me even until this day…

“Start with one project.”

Kiran urged us to complete JUST ONE project.

She also helped us focus on execution.

“Don’t go for perfection, and don’t try and change the world. Just do what you can. Test it out, document it, and then share it with others.”

Just start with one.

Fast forward 10 months and DFC Laos grew into a project with a core team of 6 volunteers and we had 9 schools, 200 children, and dozens of teachers participating.

We even partnered with a film maker who made a documentary about it, and we also partnered with a local music celebrity who became our brand ambassador and wrote and performed a DFC song at one of the schools.

Watch the video now:

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Last week I pitched an idea from the stage to a group of 50 entrepreneurs that I completed a 40-week growth accelerator program with — it was for a new outsourced service that I am offering to help creative business owners and content creators to improve their blog posts and content marketing so that they attract bigger audience and more clients online.

Blogger Mates was born.

A few days ago I got my first paying client. ‪#winning!