Be an Entrepreneur

5 minute read

Don’t be fooled, it is going to be a bumpy ride and most of your attempts have a huge chance of failure. Get ready for the most difficult time of your life.

Problem Solvers

Entrepreneurs are Problem Solvers so you have to Love the Problem otherwise you might end up giving a solution to a problem no one has.

Most entrepreneurs work on a problem they have experienced themselves. That makes having empathy something even more natural.

Personality

Characteristic  
Resilience The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.
Ability to overcome obstacles.
Keeps you moving forward despite the obstacles and failures you will face.
“It’s not how hard you can hit. It’s how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” - Rocky Balboa
Passion, Intensity, and Energy Don’t settle. When you overcome an obstacle or achieve a goal, look for the next challenge. Keep challenging yourself.
Empathy Empathy for the client, Empathy for your team - The real empathy must be natural.
Leave your Comfort Zone


Readiness to leave your comfort zone. Experiment with new things, and new possibilities even if you don’t have enough knowledge or previous experience.
  • Challenging yourself can help you perform at your peak.
  • Taking risks is what helps us grow.
  • Trying new things can make you more creative.
    		•
    Self-motivated and Self-starter Not everything is fun to do and in the beginning, most of the time, you have no one to turn to and you simply can’t stop.
    Eager to Learn Capacity to accept that there are a lot of things you don’t know or don’t know deep enough.
    Entrepreneurs are always learning and improving fast.
    That is also why we mention on almost every page of this site Recommended Books (see the full list here).
    Topic References
    Entrepreneur Personality Six Personality Traits Of Successful Entrepreneurs (by Forbes)
    Resilienve What is Resilience
    Leave yout Confort Zone 6 Reasons To Step Outside Your Comfort Zone (by Huffpost)

    Dealing with Uncertainty

    Entrepreneurship often involves Uncertainty, that is why there is so much risk involved.

    Building a Startup means working on reducing the uncertainties and therefore the risks of not addressing the right problem with the right solution at the right price using the right channel.

    The process for reducing uncertainty and risks, in the beginning, can be found on Starting Up and better detailed in Product Discovery

    Embrace failure

    Expect to fail and be prepared to learn from it.

    New businesses tend to fail or go through hard times until they can succeed. So knowing how to handle failure is vital to overcome them.

    • You need to fail to succeed.
    • Failing is not bad. Failing must be celebrated.
    • You only learn when you fail, not when you succeed.
    • But learn to fail fast. Learn when to move on and stop pushing.

    Watch “The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure” (by Astro Teller — Head of Moonshot Factory at Google)

    Never stop Learning

    Lifelong Learning means the ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated pursuit of Knowledge.

    Why keep learning?

    • Technology gets outdated fast
    • New, better, and costly ways of doing things are created daily
    • Stay always one step ahead

    Stay up-to-date by

    • Listening to Podcasts
    • Reading Blogs
    • Participating in Meetups

    For each topic, I will be providing curated References to books, podcasts, and blogs.

    Advice vs Experience

    Advice is someone else’s conclusion from experience or context that you don’t know. What is that person’s experience? Is it his/her experience or others?

    Advice is an opinion and, instead of that, you need to make your own decisions based on information. Each person’s experience is unique and specific for the moment they experienced it. Instead of Advice, ask people to tell the story behind their similar experiences so that you can understand better their decisions and make your own.

    Experiences tell you more than advice. Experiences with success or failure can teach you many things.

    Caution: Psychological Patterns

    Impostor Syndrome People with impostor syndrome engage in a psychological pattern of doubting their competence and accomplishments. In short, they feel like frauds. They attribute any successes or recognition to either luck or deception.
    Planning Fallacy The human tendency to be over-optimistic in making time estimations. Focus less on planning and more on experimenting, learning, and improving.
    FoMo Fear of Missing Out is a feeling of anxiety or insecurity over the possibility of missing out on something, as an event or an opportunity. Do your best, keep up-to-date and, most of all keep improving.

    References

    		 The Power of Habit - by Charles Duhigg
    Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
    		The Hard Thing About the Hard Things - by Ben Horowitz
    Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
    		Blitzscaling - by Reid Hoffman (founder of Linkedin)
    The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
    		Running Lean - by Ash Maurya
    Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
    Original Version Launch Year: 2010
    Key takeaways
  • Systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success.
  • 3 Principles: Document Plan A (your initial plan), Identify the Riskiest Aspects of your Plan, Systematically Test your Plan
  • 3 Stages of Startup Growth: PROBLEM/SOLUTION FIT, PRODUCT/MARKET FIT, SCALE
  • Lean Canvas: focuses on addressing broad customer problems and solutions and delivering them to customer segments through a unique value proposition.
    		•
    		The Lean Startup - by Eric Ries
    How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
    Original Version Launch Year: 2008
    Key takeaways
  • Is about maximizing learning and minimizing waste in the innovation process; it combines Customer Development, Agile software development methods and Toyota’s Lean practices.
  • Lesn Startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products, which aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning.
  • MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
  • Continuous Deployment
  • Split Testing (A/B Testing)
  • Actionable Metrics
  • Pivot
  • Build-Measure-Learn
    		•
    		Business Model Generation - by Alexander Osterwalder
    A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
    Original Version Launch Year: 2008
    Key takeaways
  • Business Model Canvas - business model design template, that help describe its business model.
    		•
    		The Four Steps to the Epiphany - by Steve Blank
    Successful Strategies for Products that Win
    Original Version Launch Year: 2005
    Key takeaways
  • Customer Feedback is a framework for incorporating customers’ inputs into your product development cycle.
  • Customer Development Methodology consists of 4 steps
  • (1) Customer Discovery: tests hypotheses about the nature of the problem, interest in the product or service solution, and business viability.
  • (2) Customer Validation: tests the business viability through customer purchases and in the process creates a 'sales road map', a proven and repeatable sales process. Customer discovery and customer validation corroborate the business model.
  • (3) Customer Creation: executes the business plan by scaling through customer acquisition, creating user demand, and directing it toward the company's sales channels.
  • (4) Customer Building: formalizes and standardizes company departments and operations.
  • Customer Discovery Steps
    		•