Why Startups Stall into Abysmal Darkness?
Is it the challenging ultimatum of ‘if you build it - they'll come’ or is it the hype created about the fields’ lucrativeness?
When it comes to the world of entrepreneurship and startup launching, one common misconception that leaves young entrepreneurs to get jaded up with the idea of pursuing entrepreneurship in the future; is the notion which implies that if an idea is worked on with consistent effort, the fruits of success reaped would multiply, with numerous customers pouring in.
Now, this notion might be considered a good one from an ‘encouraging enthusiasts’ point of view but, paying close attention, and considering the fact that if all the efforts put in by young entrepreneurs, somehow, fail to bear fruit which the entrepreneur had been cherishing to achieve, what then would be its consequence?
Here’s what it’d be for a young entrepreneur who fails to achieve according to the notion: frustrated, dishearted, and left entrepreneurship for good.
Actually, the dilemma of ‘if you build it, they’ll come’ often misleads young entrepreneurs.
As much as the notion holds true in the perfectly ideal world, one must understand that we do not thrive in the real world. We rather thrive in a world that runs on capitalism which implies that what one has succeeded in achieving, not necessarily others will do too, even if they followed in their footsteps.
And that’s the very reason why forcing someone into conforming with your own business techniques and style for success isn’t the right thing to do because let’s be honest, it’s not their style, it’s yours; and to be successful, they better adapt to their kind of style for ultimate success, or self-forge one if they lack it.
With the growing number of startup failures, today owing to our challenging environment, social and political rifts, etc, keeping young entrepreneurs on track for entrepreneurship has become touchy. The most probable reason for entrepreneurs going astray from their interest in entrepreneurship is that their experiences have given them a rough time. From failures to assess the risks involved in the field of entrepreneurship to the startups that end up miserably; entrepreneurs find themselves quickly fed up with the hectic routine that appears as a total loss in the end when they get to bear their startup stalling and are forced to lay it off.
Why is it so? What do you think is the actual reason behind the startups’ failures?
As a person who has been long researching lucrative niche ideas, entrepreneurship, and ways of earning online, the declining startup success rates itself had me cornered into not thinking of pursuing the entrepreneur's journey. But then, of course, the ads - that whenever I headed on YouTube for some entertainment, kept popping up before my eyes about the very same topics I decided to ignore - had me tempted and convinced once again that an entrepreneur's journey was indeed a lucrative one, HOWEVER, it came with the cost … the cost of taking upon the risk of failure.
That’s when I figured out that if one actually wants to follow the path of entrepreneurship to be lucky enough to become a CEO of a growing startup or launch some successful initiative someday, one should do so with the sole ultimatum of:
Gaining experience to learn something new every day, and rather than focusing on complete business success, they should rather choose to focus on working even harder the next day, merely to again learn something new the other day. The success will then come naturally and even if it lags, they won’t be dishearted because success wasn’t the actual intention anyways — Initially, it always should be about learning something new everyday till the day when all this learning together can help them transform their first-hand experience knowledge into something cool for others to either learn on or have a disticntive example of.
This thinking of mine gave me a direction as to where I need to kick start my journey as an entrepreneur and this actually makes sense because if it were so easy to become an entrepreneur, why does everyone aiming to pursue entrepreneurship out there isn’t a billionaire already? Simply because it takes time, it takes practice, it takes testing and a whole lot of it; and on top of it, it takes several failures.
Making an entrepreneur's journey a matter of success and failure completely from the very beginning is one of the major reasons why people’s interests go astray about the subject matter. The very mantra of ‘if you build it, they’ll come’, what I believe is misleading enough to make youngsters envision entrepreneurship as an all-successful journey to pursue. Envisioning that, they build their thing without having sound knowledge and experience about the field which ultimately stalls their startups into the dark abyss.
Come again … could this be the only reason for the growing stats of startup failures that we’ve been discussing?
Of course, not! That was only one direction to it!
Being dubiously curious about the very question above, I researched to find the best probable answers thinking that the recent halt put forth on our economies’ progress by lockdowns might be the actual reason for the growing number of declines but to my surprise, I concluded from my findings that to put the entire blame on our present-day economies as of the pandemics is an answer out of the league for such type of questions because it's not only after the pandemic that the world of new startups observed a declining slope.
Let’s get back to how people develop an interest in entrepreneurship and their level of understanding of the subject matter. As far as I understand, there are three categories to it:
- People having some great passions or hobbies
- People who get the know-how about the field from Ads on social media or their coursework
- People who are forced to study the subject matter, as a secondary subject, necessarily as part of their coursework
Now you must have heard everyone on YouTube or social media saying: ‘turn your passion into a business.’
Right we get that! But did anyone ever ask you something like: ‘what could be the probable risks you’ll face in turning your passion into a lucrative side hustle/business?’.
No … Nobody talks about the risks involved in the entrepreneurs' journey like the way they build up the hype about its lucrativeness. Consequently, the millennials transpiring ideas in their minds get along their journey as an entrepreneur with little to no knowledge of the process. Some get lucky enough to turn their ideas into a successful brand story, however, most don’t make it there and ultimately end up in failure, thereby shunning the idea of entrepreneurship any further.
In fact, what most people think is that having a passion should normally come conjoined with entrepreneurship; meaning that if one is good at something, it's natural for him to also must come up with the idea of turning that something into a business. And that’s exactly where people falter! Entrepreneurship does not come naturally, it comes with application and testing which itself is geared by multiple failures.
Consider understanding two steps as a complete process for successful entrepreneurship: learn and apply. Regardless of which category you belong to, beginner or expert level entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship is something that requires people to repeatedly get involved within the two steps of learning and applying. Simply put, successful entrepreneurs are the people who always remain stuck within the loop of learning and applying. For them, a failure does not mean putting an end to their course of action, it rather implies to them that there exists room for learning newer things, newer concepts and newer ways which when applied will somewhere along their journey, highlight the road of success for all their entrepreneurial efforts.
And this is the very reason I believe why entrepreneurship should always be initiated with the mindset of learning; learning to the point where your knowledge is enough to not let your entrepreneurial journey stall into the abyss of darkness. And since there’s no end to learning, successful entrepreneurs never come out of that learn-apply loop. So long as the entrepreneurs, beginners or experts, remain confined to the learn-apply loop for every idea that comes to their mind, they become clued up, gaining experience about the subject matter which ultimately strengthens their chances of success in the entrepreneurial field.
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