The first year of any business is super weird. There’s risk. There’s energy. There’s hope, confusion, joy, anger, success, failure: basically any emotion you can feel you will feel, like some sort of emotional Murphy’s Law. It’s no wonder that 9 out of 10 startups fail, but those with enough grit may live to see another day. During that rocky time, I learned a couple of lessons the hard way and I’ll share them with you so that you don’t have to learn the hard way too.
As entrepreneurs, we tend to be optimistic and eager. Think about it: we need to be to take the risks that we do. But sometimes our eyes are larger than our stomachs. When we’re eyeing all these goals we risk losing sight of what really matters. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. When you focus on making the customer happy with an excellent product, a network of glowing customer referrals can be more helpful in the first stages of your business than Search Engine Optimization.
While it’s lonely being an entrepreneur, we can find each other through communities like Unstuck. These business networking groups are fantastic for meeting new people from local businesses and learning from their experiences, wins and losses. You just might solve a hard problem in the process.
But remember that entrepreneurship isn’t for the faint of heart. Learn as much as you can, take the good with the bad, and focus on what you set out to do in the first place.
Let me know what you think! Shoot me an email! Let’s grab coffee! Endorse me for puppeteering on LinkedIn!