I asked a question earlier today on Twitter - if you have an idea for a business, big or small idea, what is holding you back from starting that business? I got a few replies, mostly around money or lack thereof, and also a lack of confidence that he/she could raise enough money to start the business. The reason I am asking is actually to get to another question - how have people done it? Starting a business is hard. There are many hurdles. How have people successfully addressed those hurdles?
If you had a money hurdle, what did you change in your life to manage that? Did you move? Did you vow to eat ramen? Did you use your credit cards?
If you had a confidence problem, what did you change in your life to manage that?
So first, I am trying to get at what holds people back, then I am trying to get at the solutions - boring or even better, creative, that allowed people to move ahead. It seems to me a lot of folks want to do something on their own, but for a variety of reasons they don't. I suspect that a lot of issues that typically stop people are shared - and some people say "oh well, I can't do it" and others push through. In the start up world we talk a lot about what makes a business successful - but we don't as often hear the personal stories behind the people who make it happen - what choices and trade-offs they chose to make to pursue their dream. People love to say "I can't do it because of [insert excuse]". Of course you CAN, you are choosing not to for some other reason. Let's break that down and give people some real life ideas for how to make it happen.
If you have some thoughts on this, comment here or send me an email to [email protected]. I would love to hear from you. I meet a lot of people with interesting ideas who STOP. I would love to help them move past that with some interesting examples of people who pushed ahead.
I'd love to tell you the obstacles I overcame when starting Edmodo. First I had an idea, i had a coding backgrond but I realize i'm not the best coder in the world so I found a rockstar programmer to bounce some of my ideas off of and we spent a few months hashing out those ideas while building a great working relationship. As far as money, we didn't have anything substantial, we used our paychecks from our day job to finance hosting services and worked on Edmodo on nights and weekends. For anybody looking to start anything, you have to making excuses and overcome the problems with any means necessary. The beauty of today's world is it doesn't take much money to start, you have to be persistant, and you have to go for broke. Passion for something will win out.
Posted by: Jeff O'Hara | June 22, 2009 at 02:28 PM