Avoid Losing Everything When Starting Up
This article is written by Munira Hussein, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Derek Andersen is the co-founder and CEO of Startup Grind, a community of over 600 Chapters in 120 countries designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. Derek has vast experience in entrepreneurship and was present at Etohum San Francisco conference, where he shared his views and journey on entrepreneurship.
When starting out, you are without funds most times. It is okay to keep a job and run your business for some time but there comes a time when you have to quit and build your vision. this moment is usually terrifying especially if you have family responsibilities and bills to pay.
However, it is important to Invest in your business, not just time but even finances. There aren’t enough entrepreneurs in the world to solve all the problems and challenges at hand. With the right strategy and keen observation, you have a great chance of making a massive disruption which is what every startup hopes for.
Cultivate relationships for your products, find a way to give it a life. Then ensure that it stays alive. It is hard to bring things back to life. Even when you do, it might have a lot of problems and in fixing too many problems that should have been avoided in the beginning, you waste a lot of valuable time. Great ideas have an unnatural momentum. Once you start out, it will pick itself up, build itself and move forward.
The key is to remember that it is always about somebody else. Get out of the me mentality. Solve their problems. If you help other people, your life will be better.
As you hustle and put things together for the growth of your startup, focus on not going to jail. It might sound farfetched but stay out of trouble. It is important that you make it but it is more important if you have your freedom. If you are married or with kids, you might also want to focus on not having your kids and wife hate you. If you can focus on these three things, everything will be just fine. Spend time with them. Even as you build your business, build your relationship with the family too. When you mess up your startup, hope you haven’t messed up your life too. No one on their death bed wishes they had worked harder, they just wished they had more meaningful relationships. Cultivate that so that even in the case of business failure, you have your relationships to fall back on.
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