If I could count how many times people have come up to me and pointed how brilliant their idea was and why they would succeed, I will be out of fingers and toes 5 times over. Spirit is good! I love people who show drive and determination, but I also admire people who are pragmatic. If you are in the process of building a start-up, you must combine your admirable optimism with a realization that there’s always a chance of failure. This is the attitude that will carry you along, so saddle up.
What is so special about your idea? so you’ve come up with this idea and you are confident you will do big things. What gives you this confidence? Do you realize that atleast 60% of failed start-ups were built by people who also like you believed their ideas were “out of this world” and would go on to be successful? The truth is that many successful start-ups have been built on ideas that are not so original, many have tried and have failed with that idea, before that successful one came along. I am pretty sure there have been many attempts at building “facebook” before facebook came along. There’s always something extra that makes a business successful besides the “bright idea”, seek that!
You are passionate and driven, great! so? The success of a start-up does depend on a whole lot on the founder, management and team but once again, it is not the sole decider of the fortunes of that venture. Your self drive is a very important quality for any entrepreneur, because it is what will get you going when things get rough, however success demands alot more than that. Is your marketing game on point? have you been successful in securing enough funding to place you in a comfortable position? All these factors come into play and you must be on top of your tactics when tackling each.
It takes more than ability. I once read a review of playcafe, a failed start-up built by some old paypal employees. It was an online gameshow network and believe it or not, it showed a lot of promise at the beginning. It got good support and enough funding from angel investors, but it failed. You can’t say these guys failed because they didn’t know about building or running a web company, they actually did. You can’t say they didn’t have connections and support, they did but yet they failed. In an article by one of the founders, he claimed the reasons for their failure was paying attention to the wrong things and not marketing right. For any start-up or new entrepreneur building a new start-up, make sure above everything that your marketing plan is absolutely spot-on! A great marketing team could lead to such success heights that a great development team can’t. Learn!
If failure beckons? I don’t know about you but I never accept failure. I never had to retake a class in college and the soccer team I played on never failed, we lost some games but we never failed. I detest that word, I see losing as an opportunity to learn a few lessons that I won’t have noticed if I had won. Every successful entrepreneur had and have tough patches and many were close to giving up, but they didn’t. If things start to look dire, please give it another push, give it a good shot. Edison didn’t consider the times the bulb failed to light up as failures, he simply saw them as ways not to build a lightbulb. Borrow this same mentality and live by it if you are going to be successful.
closing remarks: no one is above failure, but everyone has the chance to succeed.
