The Curse Of An Entrepreneur

Every day could be a blessing in disguise, turned well into a curse however. Should you choose to make it so.

I have no idea who said this. Maybe I did, or an abstract part of my mind made it up. However what is important is that we can make our own choices about being one side of the coin.

Entrepreneurship is a beautiful journey, glorified even further by the inspiring tales of grit, passion, and never say die spirit of its protagonists.

But the pathway of entrepreneurship (however much glamorized and feted) isn’t exactly a bed of roses, and rightly so. After all when did anything great come out of something easy.

On this path, when things go your way, there could be nothing greater. But when things do not go our way (always the more likely scenario), it almost feels like you are cursed. Under circumstances as such, circumstances are surprisingly, more often than not, uniform across different individual entrepreneurs.

For starters quoting a few of them here

• No funds. What do I do.
• The traffic is still the same. I have done everything possible. How do I do it now.
• What do I tell everyone.
• I don’t think we will survive this.

All these and more add to the misery of an already seemingly strained life.

Personally I have been taking my shot at entrepreneurship for the last 2 years.

In this short duration of a time, I haven’t achieved much. Tried doing a lot of things right. Ended up doing a major part of it wrong. In fact I am pretty sure I played out almost all the romanticized stereotypes in this duration.

Checklist

1. Did not have money for food. Had to settle down for whatever was there.
2. So incredibly cash burnt out, had to plan how to get to office.
3. For a month or so couldn’t even figure out how to get out of bed to do what I am supposed to do.

And so forth..

These are the stereotyped down times. The low times as they say.

Now I am neither learned enough, nor am I experienced enough as most of the stalwarts who preach their knowledge of this journey to deliver a #Survival 101 routine.

However from what I have observed till date, here is what I would like to re-iterate for all those entrepreneurial aspirants building the next big thing, for the days that seem cursed:

It ain’t about the money, honey

Because of the billions of funds being picked up by one startup after the other, a good company (lets drop the startup term here. It’s already over utilized) today, is judged by the funding it raises. In fact more often than not the next question to what are you building is, are you funded?

Frankly honey, it ain’t about the money. The reason most of us die out in the bud itself is because of the need to raise funds for the product/platform to be built. Of course you do need money for paying your bills and your team, but frankly if raising funds is the next big agenda of the company, you are in deep shit.

Curse #101: When in dire straits with no money left, raising funds does become a priority. Just that letting this priority cloud a bigger, better intent behind the platform isn’t the way forward.  It is just a temporary problem which is solvable. Maybe you are really good at something or an expert in your domain. You could draw some funds off your expertise or figure out a way to use the goodness of what you are building to pay for at least the current bills. The more strategic funds can wait.

Not all of our friends and family can put in a round I guess, so I will leave this option alone.

Growth is good, fast growth is even better. Irresponsible growth however isn’t

With growth hacking being a term interchangeably used with growing the company, fast growth is always the need of the hour for a nascent product/platform and largely the company. And there is no better focus than focusing on growing your company. However growth should never precede the requirement that your company is actually being helpful to its users.

Curse #102: We desire and crave growth. In the process we slowly start letting the metrics of growth actually precede the usefulness of what we do.

Explosive growth is a function of many variables. It comes early for some, and takes time for others. But it never comes if we solely focus on user acquisition, and the quintessential how will the traffic grow conundrum. Instead the focus can and should always be on are we even helping the 10 users we have. If we do that significantly well, the critical mass, growth and the rest will follow. Everything else will be history.

What do we do NEXT:

The above circumstances apart, there would be a thousand other unknown variables which leave us on our toes and with the question of, what next.

And this is from a personal experience of my last few weeks. Nothing has moved for me and the companies I am a primary stakeholder of. I was so burnt along with my co-stakeholders that we were just hanging on to and trying everything that we could to take things forward.

Curse #103: Undesirable unknown variables will always be showered upon us. However trying anything we can under the circumstance isn’t what we do best.

When under this curse, just remember we are entrepreneurs in our own right.We are problem solvers. And every problem has a solution attached. It might be tried and tested or something that we have to design as a new solution. But the bottomline is, there is a solution. So instead of trying anything under the sun, remember the basics and frame a focused new solution. Because that is what we do best. Re-iterate the following:

1. Help your user
2. Use the goodness of whatever much you have built till date
3. And if nothing works out,shift gears and try a new solution. Stay true to your roots, and repeat steps 1 & 2, and it might be a new better beginning for all you know.

At the end of the day, even after all of this nothing great might happen within this month. But the year has eleven months more and 12 months after that. What might be a curse today, could well be your blessed step to a greater morrow.

And if nothing else: Your enterprise would fail. So what?

Enterprises fail. Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship do not. Because no matter what, you do learn a lesson.

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