Unspun lessons from a startup entrepreneur at the coal-face. By Sahil Merchant.
Most entrepreneurs, while surrounded with people, walk a lonely road.However, this Valentine’s Day, spare a thought for the wifes/husbands/girlfriends/boyfriends of entrepreneurs, who oftenlive with even greater degrees of isolation and uncertainly than their partners.
We recently got slammed. Last week, I was cc’d on seven emails in the space of a minute. They were all from Wordpress, each one a comment from the mag nation blog waiting for approval. On further examination, the author of all seven comments was the same person, and they had posted the exact same comment on seven different blog posts.
As I lie in bed writing this on a Sunday morning, I am bracing myself for a wave of criticism. There is going to be a fair dose of irony in this article, and depending on where it meanders, I can imagine it pissing off a lot of people.
As I lie in bed writing this on a Sunday morning, I am bracing myself for a wave of criticism. There is going to be a fair dose of irony in this article, and depending on where it meanders, I can imagine it pissing off a lot of people.
I have come to realise that innovation and creativity are rarely about killer ideas, but more often connected to a cycle of trying, learning and adapting. Big companies don’t always reward this process. It is often about getting it right, which doesn’t bode well for allowing space to try, fail and try once again. Take our recent “Undies Monday” promotion…
I think it is safe to say that most entrepreneurs are pretty motivated people. To risk everything to create something new, you have to have a fairly clear idea of what you want to achieve.
When it comes to building a company from scratch, there’s no substitute for hard work, writes Sahil Merchant.
A company’s culture is set early and by the founder. If you hook in from the get-go, the resulting stories can become the stuff of legend that sustains staff morale long into the future, says Sahil Merchant.
An ex-colleague of mine, the least entrepreneurial person I have ever met, gave me the best piece of entrepreneurial advice I have ever received. She told me just as I was starting mag nation that my most important job would be having a coffee with five random people every week. I smiled politely and filed this one in the back pocket. She was right, though. When I have lived by this rule, my business has progressed. When I have ignored it, we have stagnated.
We all want the best for our families, and building successful companies is one of the best ways to provide for them. But while you’re off establishing your empire, will your kids turn into spoilt ingrates?
I’m in the middle of raising another round of capital and it occurs to me that one of the costs of professional investment, especially with VCs or Private Equity firms, is complexity. Not many people talk about this.
If you haven’t hit up your family, friends and fools to investment in your new venture, angel investors have every right to be sceptical. Sahil Merchant has a bunch of ruthless angles crowded on his shoulders, and he thinks it’s a damn fine thing.
I’ve heard it a hundred times. Entrepreneurs need to work on their business as opposed to in their business.
However, getting stuck in the day-to-day happens to most of us, and the obvious question is ‘why?’ Especially when we know it is not in the best interests of our company. Are we just inherently forgetful, or is something else in play?
People ask me quite regularly if I can look over their numbers prior to them talking to potential funders. I have generally been happy to do so, but the truth is that I will have no clue. Neither will the potential funders. And, most likely, neither will you. The thing about most new ventures is…well, they are new. So we put down our best guesses, present them as the gospel truth and everyone pretends they know more than everyone else. What a crock.
Today we launch a new blog. ‘The Entrepreneurial Truth’ is written by mag nation fopunder, Sahil Merchant. In this, his first post, Merchant admits that his new venture has yet to turn a cent of profit and offers his own brand of unspun entrepreneurial truth, direct for the coal-face.
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