How Hard is Entrepreneurship Really
Having worked in the corporate world, co-founded a startup and now embarking on a solopreneurship career, I have a little perspective. Entrepreneurship is freaking hard.
Starting a business from scratch goes through many phases
- Idea
- Passion
- Research
- Fear someone will steal your idea
- Work like Hell
- Reality check from customers
- Work like Hell some more
- Financial drain
- Anxiety and desperation
- More work like Hell
- Pivot to New Idea
- Repeat
Somewhere in this cycle, you start to earn some money.
We pivoted twice until we found an idea for a product that seemed to get traction.
At our first trade show, we displayed rough prototypes of the product. Consumers and buyers loved it and wanted to place orders — large orders. Unfortunately, all we had was a prototype and no firm date for an actual product.
Lesson Learned: Customers Prefer Products That Exist
All we could do was collect contact info and say:
“We’ll get back to you in a few months.”
Leads go cold quickly.
Starting and growing a small business shares all the same attributes as a large business (research, development, operations, service, etc) it’s just a matter of scale.
When things go wrong in the corporate world, it’s easy to lay the blame on leadership. When it happens to your own company, you can only look in the mirror.
Even if your endeavor fails to achieve massive commercial success, the lessons you learn are priceless. And, the maxim that you learn the most from your mistakes is true.
Ed
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