We all have this dream. To be able to start our own company, be our own boss. Fly to business trips, take fancy vacations. Throw money here and there.
But in reality 90% new startups fail and under 50% of businesses make it to their fifth year.
While on the plane to vacation in April i had an idea. I found some niche where i could help the people that needed my service.
After one week of vacation i came back home. I still had the excitement of project that i was going to build. But there were couple of challenges. Main one was to hire an engineer to architect, design. Basically to do all the ground work.
But i didn't have money to support an engineer nor i didn't have prior experience of architecting and finishing project from start to finish. The only option was to start myself and learn a long the way. So i did that. Everything went well and long story short i finished the project in about 2.5 months. Product looked great except minor validation, security issues. I thought i would hire senior engineers to fix those issues after getting the funding.
So, i announced the project and set up the funding/donation systems. But i didn't get the feedback that i was hoping for. I was able to get users to my app but my further plans were changed for couple of reasons.
And i quickly realized that i had tons of lessons to learn from this project that i would like to share in this post. Two of them are quotes from someone that i believe relates to my situation. Here is the list:
Don't start a company/project by thinking this is good or will benefit to you. Always prioritize the users.
"Unfortunately ideas are worthless. They are worthless because whatever circumstances existed for you to have your idea in a pool of 7 billion people also exist for someone else. Which means that ideas aren’t unique" - Moisey Uretsky, Cofounder DigitalOcean
"Forget about the “uniqueness” and “specialness” of your idea and instead get out into the world and build it. If that means going into credit card debt, or raising a friends and family round, or learning to code for yourself so that you can bring it to the market. That’s what really matters" - Moisey Uretsky, Cofounder DigitalOcean
Coding everything up by yourself is a burden unless you are some sort of genius.
A lot of times you had to be selfish to succeed.
You end up spending most of the time alone figuring out solutions while your friends having fun. That is not a sweet thing most of the time.
Least sweet thing in the world is asking, raising money for your idea. No one cares what are you up to and about your idea. The values you think your product might bring to their lives is less important for them and usually ignored or forgotten by daily duties.
You lose significant amount of health in the process. That might be your back from long ours of sitting or your digestion system because of too much eating or eating all day long from stress that brings your work.
Don’t concentrate on 10% people hating. Probably there are 90% people who liked your product but decided to remain silent. Don’t lose 90% just because of 10% are haters.
Hope this article will help readers and motivate them keep hustling!
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