What it takes to become Entrepreneur

For those of you who are not aware of it, I did decide to become entrepreneur 2 years ago. I had spent 13 years working for small and large companies, I learnt a lot but I decided I had to try something new.

It’s been now 12 months that I’ve been working on the company and we’re closed to launch our first App Beesy.

Looking back on how things went, I thought it might useful for some of you to share some of my experience of these past months. Obviously, it’s just my 2 cents on this one and it will probably lead to on-going posts on the topic, to report on the success and the failures.

First of all, how do you end-up quitting a high-wages job and become a start-up entrepreneur.

Simple: Passion.

Although definitely not a passport for success, Passion is one key element to start your own company, as it is the fuel that will help you go through the good and the BAD times.

This is what keep you motivated and gives you the energy to overcome hurdles and move forward.

If you’re tired of your boss and you’ve got ideas, that’s not enough. It’s a good start but you have to question your inner motivations to go one step forward. Because ideas are not enough when facing doubts, problems or failure. Passion can be.

By the way, ideas are nothing… just pure thoughts. Delivering the idea is actually the real job. That’s why you should be keen on sharing them.

On my side, it helps me when I think that I can actually shape a small part of this world, in a pure act of willpower.

But another asset you should have is curiosity

Indeed, building something is not just about taking care of an idea that meets your own passion for something but it’s taking care of everything.

And if you’re only willing to learn and work on your passion, this will surely lead to failure. You have to be eager to learn and do things that you were not aware of at the beginning:

finance, legal, development, marketing, sales, design, whatever it takes to deliver your idea and make it a reality …

During those 12 months, I had to become a full-blown IoS developer, a Digital Marketer, a Web-designer and much more.

Each time I had to learn and learn it fast. I’m still learning by the way. But the point is: even though I have no passion whatsoever about Photoshop, I did learn to use it out of curiosity and because it feeds my passion.

I have to admit that one of the biggest productivity tool in this area is Google. 10 years ago, what I did (and thousands of other founders) would have been impossible.

Today, in a matter of a day, thanks to Google and the web, you can teach yourself on a subject and learn enough to start acting on this subject. The biggest bonus: now you’re not bound to try and learn, you can learn as well for others trials and failure, making the learning curve much faster.

If you think of it, it’s a major step forward to be able to learn from others mistake. 10 years ago, the only thing you could do is learn a subject by the books, finding out about the theories and academical context but you wouldn’t have found a worldwide experience logbook as you can today. The only learning curve you could experience was by trying and failing all by yourself.

Obviously, you can still fail ! but you can skip the basics.

A bit of open-mind

Well, I say a bit, because it’s all about balance.

Off course, you have to listen carefully about people say about your idea, your product, your pitch, whatever you’re trying to build.

But you also need to keep your guts’ feelings strong and clear. Off course, it’s not about being stubborn if there’s evidently no market or if your product does not fulfill the customer expectations. But your product will never be perfect, you’ll always find different views on how to solve the problem you’re trying to solve and that’s fine. You have to live with it.

Being open-minded on your product is a difficult task of merging customer expectations and your beliefs.

It takes a great deal of humility and pragmatism while sticking to your core principles.

By looking at others and by trying to balance this, I defined a small internal mental process to actually better balance both sides: i have defined 3 core customer problems that I’m trying to solve and I analyze feedbacks and reactions on how better I could solve those issues with these comments.

Regarding the business itself, feedback are rather positive on the problem and the need, so I’m staying focused on delivering the app and see how it solves it.

 

Well that’s all for the moment, but since the last 15 days where I’ve been in the process of an app delivery, I thought it was interesting to share with you how many different things I had to go through and in the end why I could possibly be doing all of this.

 

Stay tuned