Indecisiveness Killed the Entrepreneur
In 2013 I had this great idea to create an Open Face Chinese Poker app. At the time OFC was hot in the poker world, and I loved the game. I convinced my friends and family to invest in my idea and set out to create the app. But I made a grave mistake by hiring a firm in India to write the code. Turns out that firm just hired someone else to do the work while keeping most of the money for themselves. I had no idea the team I was working with was not in the same company I had hired. In the end all the money that my friends and family had invested in me, nearly $35,000, was gone and all I had to show for it was a broken piece of software. Within a year, I was out of money which meant the app and the idea were both dead.
Having failed so miserably, the summer of 2014 became one of the lowest points in my life. I was angry and depressed and made a lot of bad decisions. What brought me out of that depression was reading the book Think and Grow Rich. I took an oath right there and then to become a successful entrepreneur.
But I had this horrible dilemma hanging over me. Here I had created this poker company and got my friends and family to invest their hard earned money under the pretense of following my dreams. Now the company was dead and I felt like a total fraud. I wanted so badly to start something new, something that I wanted to do, like a startup publication, but the guilt of losing my family’s money ate at me. It plagued me for months. Do I keep trying to build the poker company or do I create something new?
In my mind, starting something new while not having exhausted every opportunity to make the poker company succeed was betraying the people who invested in me. This decision was so big to me that it took me 3 months to make it. 3 months! I even wrote about my struggle.
Despite the time wasted agonizing over which was the right side project, I tried both. I spent another $5k and 8 months trying to resuscitate the poker company as a live poker tour, and at the same time tried to create a for profit Medium publication. Both ventures failed.
What burns me more than the time and money I lost trying to execute doomed ideas was the time I lost deliberating between them.
Fast forward to today and I fell into the same indecisiveness trap again. I am in process of looking for a store front for Feather Laundry, my current business. I found 2 places that suited my needs. I spent a couple of weeks deliberating the pros and cons of each and comparing them over and over.
When I started to feel the pressure of time I decided to pursue both just in case one of them fell through. Then they both fell through. And here I am back at square one, having wasted all that time deliberating something that didn’t matter in the end.
The lesson here is clear — don’t get analysis paralysis. The faster a decision is made, the sooner it can be known whether or not it was the right decision. Most of the time if it is the wrong decision you can adapt or correct it.
Once both rejections came in I unplugged myself from my situation and took a full 24 hours off of work. I was drained.
I’ve recovered and I’m ready to get back to work. Going forward I hope to spend a lot less time deliberating and a lot more time executing.
This story is part of a series documenting the journey of a 2016 Dallas startup called Feather. For your reference here is the Table of Contents for the series.
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