Why You Have To Stop “Playing Business” If You Want Your Entrepreneurial Dreams To Come True
I fell in love with hostels during a college study abroad trip. By 2014, I had stayed in over 150 hostels in thirty countries. I’ve slept on everything from pillow-top beds with handmade duvet covers that could rival any Four Seasons, all the way down to hammocks strung above dead cow parts on a cargo ship in the Amazon rainforest (advertised, of course, as a “luxury cot”).
When you stay in a hostel, it’s an adventure unto itself. You’re straying from the beaten path; you never quite know what’s going to happen next or who you’ll meet along the way. Guests mix and mingle with each other in a way they never do at hotels, and the close quarters lead to lifetime friendships. As anyone who has spent time on the hostel trail can attest, it’s a slice of traveling life you have to see (and experience) to believe — and I had seen enough of it to know the good, bad, and ugly.
Over the years, I’d always return home from my travels longing for the atmosphere inside hostels. Hoping to find a way of recreating that excitement and camaraderie without having to jump on a plane, I moved to Austin, Texas in 2014 and invested nearly every dollar I had in opening what I hoped would be a very different kind of hostel. A hostel that finally incorporated all the best pieces of what a hostel could be.
Easier said than done: hostels aren’t the most understood thing in the neighborhood, to put it mildly. It took a full year of wrangling with the city, acquiring permits, finding partners, and establishing ourselves, fighting city hall at almost every turn. It was, at times, totally maddening. One example: it took three months, twelve (unanswered) emails, and four different trips from city inspectors just to reach consensus on — wait for it — the height of our stairs. And that was just one of thirty such measurements or approvals we needed. But it was all worth it when we could open our doors to guests, and at long last, in June 2015, HK Austin was born. By the end of 2015, in a result none of us expected, HK Austin was the highest-rated hostel in America.
It was a year packed with mistakes, heartbreak, and dozens of sleepless nights. But like any great entrepreneurial journey — or any journey at all — I walked away with scars and lessons that will last a lifetime.
If there is anything I could have done differently early on, it would have been to stop “playing business” and just start.
“Playing business” is a very easy trap to fall into when scrambling to do any and everything you can think of to “help” your business. For me, “playing business” meant, among other things: setting up profiles on sites like AngelList, trying to get local bloggers to come to various BBQs, reaching out to other local business owners, researching complicated legal structures for when it was time to grow, trying to gain Twitter followers, spending weeks on logo creation, and plenty of other premature things that didn’t directly impact a guest’s stay at our hostel that night.
The reality is none of these tiny details matter if nobody likes your product. Take it from me; as someone who helps other people market their books, companies, and personal brands to make a living, more than anything I wanted to try every “growth marketing” hack, campaign, and strategy to grow HK Austin. But, at the beginning of every business, product must come first. When we dropped the bullshit and focused solely on the guest’s experiences, our reputation grew, and all of the little details started to take care of themselves. Now bloggers reach out to us for write-ups, people follow us organically on Twitter, and other business owners want to talk business with us.
If what you’re doing each hour doesn’t directly and immediately benefit your customer’s experience, you should probably be doing something else.
Be honest with yourself: Are you setting up profiles on these sites for the dopamine hit of satisfaction they give you, or because they will actually improve the business? Are you ignoring or avoiding some more difficult task that’s actually tied to your success, in favor of idling on social media websites, gaining “followers” who will never become customers, and planning for realities way off in the distance rather than focusing on the here and now?
But even before you’re playing business, you need to start.
Here’s a daydream familiar to anyone who has launched a product or company: the larger-than-life grand opening. In our imagination, we’d invite our friends, family, and the press, and they’d all be blown away by our perfect hostel machine. We’d pop champagne from the second-floor balcony, admire the amazing art on the wall, and laugh with all the guests occupying every bed in the place. Until that exact moment was possible, my partner didn’t want to be in business at all. It was another excuse for inaction, another excuse to “hit the whiteboard” and plan some more, instead of actually hosting guests, which is the only thing that can actually improve our business.
There is no perfect time to launch. A “grand opening” or a “launch party” — these are usually just overhyped events that don’t deliver any kind of sustained firepower, revenue, or sales.
When the time actually came for HK Austin to open, we had bare walls and only half of the beds ready. We couldn’t afford champagne, and we had a grand total of two guests. But we launched faster than we thought and did everything we could to make the best two-bed hostel in the world. There was no reason to wait till we had everything set up to give it a true effort. In startup talk, we had achieved a minimum viable product. Every day since, we’ve worked to make the place a little bit better and slightly closer to that finely tuned machine of our dreams.
Start now. Figure out the rest as you go along and leave all the “playing” behind.
Looking to start a hostel of your own? Check out my 21 Tips for Opening a Hostel.
