Confessions of a Startup-O-Holic

An entrepreneur is the squinted cameramen of the Ram Gopal Verma films, willing to look at things from different angles, is that poor unfortunate soul who wants to bowl against the Chris Gayle, take challenges head on in the worst of circumstances. Being broke is his confession and being extravagant is his lifestyle, he works for himself and yet is strained by his employees, his challenges are his rewards and his competition is his inspiration.

At least dreaming is free!!!

Building a company, leading a team and sustaining a business is definitely hard work and requires a lot of knowledge. As a start up guy you invest in your own knowledge and skills to shape your dreams. Being cash starved does not mean that you cannot dream big, if we aim for the mars; we may land on the moon. What we envisaged for mytestbuddy.com when we started, was a lot different from what we are today but we surely have kept upgrading our dreams over the period of time and it has helped us to be motivated.

Fail fast, 95% of them do, not!

Having heard this quite often, I would like to challenge this normally held ideal. Many of my entrepreneur friends have been talking about failing fast and moving on. Well, I don’t think so.. When you start up, you are chase a dream and are working for something that has been a real pain for you. It’s not a taylor swift boyfriend situation that you change your start up every season, why not work it out, why not find newer solutions for the problems that you trying to solve and call your product version 1.0.

Agree to disagree!!

It’s just too important to find the right choice of people you want to be within your start up! Working with people who share the same view point seems like a good idea but in my experience I have found that finding the person who is not afraid to challenge you is a better person to work with. When entrepreneurs with a common cause but with different approaches to a problem come together then it surely works wonders. You start agreeing to disagree with each other for your start up!!!

Have it flaunt it.

Your idea is yours only and no one else can be passionate enough about it as you are, if you have an idea or a business prototype, it’s better to flaunt it than to hide it. I have personally felt that by discussing and challenging my ideas I have always benefitted than being robbed of a perfectly good business plan. Again when you launch your prototype as soon as its ready, you will start finding and getting responses that will encourage you to create a product which your users always wanted!

This is a guest post by Dr. Deep Lodhari. Deep comes from that rare breed of doctors who follow their heart and pursue their dreams even if they don’t align with what they have studied. He is passionate about changing the way students in India study for their exams and he set out on an endeavor to create an online exam companion for the students known as “www.mytestbuddy.com“. He is Funny, has a taste-bud for good music and is everything but Boring.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.