What i learned from Entrepreneurship
Looking back on my 3 year Entrepreneurial journey with many failures and some successes; i found i have experienced many of the lessons we usually read in books and entrepreneurship articles and learned new ones too
Entrepreneurship
Is a shift to a different life, a life that is so interesting, fruitful, evolutionary, full of learning, growing and achievements
Entrepreneurship will make you a better person, will open new doors and opportunities, will give you access to places, resources, connections and smart passionate people whom you would have not probably met in another career
What it takes to be an Entrepreneur
No pain no Gain … one of the sayings which perfectly describes what it takes to be an Entrepreneur, you have to have special personal qualities to succeed, else don’t even try
You have to be Persistent, Flexible, Passionate about what you are doing, also you have to be Quick in decision making as a well as Strategic and Analytical thinking, you have to take Risks, invest your Time and Money in your business (at some point i spent 75% of my savings and managed to get them back) and lots of other sacrifices
Choice
1- Team, Idea, Market size (avoid local, non-scalable stuff) and Timing are the most important factors to consider when starting a new project
2- The idea should be Simple, focused on a Niche area, relieving a Pain point (valuable) for your clients/users and it should also be Scalable
3- Choose skilled passionate Team and complementary/committed co-founders
Execution
1- Focus … give your startup your full brain and energy Mark Zuckerberg’s T-shirt
2- You have to be Fast, Flexible with failures, move forward and don’t be stubborn
3- Growth and revenue is a key to startup success, it is not about how technologically advanced your stuff is, does people really need it or like it ! you should have aggressive marketing and growth goals and measure them on a weekly basis
4- Be Active and Visible in the market and in the community, participate in conferences and events
5- Your product features are what your client say they want or expect when you meet them and show them prototypes, build it in their office, you should be doing what they say they want not what you think they need, get as much feedback as you can all the time
Final Tips
1- Never work alone, find a co-founder asap, you can start alone to learn and experience some failures and learn form them, but don’t think you can manage a startup alone, it will not grow
2- Growth (selling/getting more users ) and Marketing are far more important than Development and Technology, allocate time and resources accordingly …
3- Choose your Role wisely in the company, a CEO should have some special qualities, sometimes technical people are not a good fit for it, also if you are a CEO make sure you don’t have what i call Anti-scalability characteristics
4- Let Investors in as soon as you can, not only for their money, but more importantly for their guidance, experience and connections
