LIFE LESSONS

3 Lessons I Learned From Starting A Business at 17

And how you can apply these lessons to starting your first (online writing) business

1.) Before investing your most valuable resource — your time — into a potential business venture, in my case, a startup social business, it is vital to assess its practicality.

In other words, the feasibility of your idea or concept coming to fruition. This includes its financial feasibility. For us, this was a larger gap to bridge as we had highly ambitious goals. There’s nothing wrong with setting lofty aims, but these must be tempered by reality. In business, “shooting for the moon” is great in theory, but doesn’t always translate to starting a profitable business.

For instance, we wanted to ultimately create a self-sustaining social business that would generate revenue from selling plastic waste. The goal was to use this money to run the business, and any extra profit would be reinvested in the company. While this sounded good in theory, it wasn’t feasible given our resources at the time. We didn’t have the financial nor the human capital to accomplish our goals.

Perhaps, in retrospect, if we had set a more realistic goal given our brief two months and limited money, we would have achieved it and been encouraged to take our idea further. One such goal could have been to market our business successfully and network in the Atlanta community. We did do this, and if we had set this as our final goal for that summer at least, we may have been spurred to continue working on the business remotely in college instead of giving up on it.

If you’re trying to start making money writing online as I imagine many people reading this may be, or if you want to start any business for that matter, temper your lofty goals with more realistic ones.

One strategy to do this is to break up goals by time. For example, if your ultimate goal is to have 10K followers and make thousands in a month, you may get discouraged because it is highly unlikely you reach these numbers organically in such a short amount of time if you are really starting from scratch.

A more reasonable goal would be to aim for 100 followers at first and maybe aim to earn $20 first. This doesn’t mean you give up on your final goal, of course, but it actually makes it more likely you will one day end up reaching your goal because you’ll be less likely to give up.

2. Don’t underestimate the importance of networking.

I used to be incredibly naive in thinking that fields not traditionally associated with networking, like medicine, did not require it as a skill to make it up the career ranks. I was completely wrong.

Networking is an essential part of any career or profession, whether it’s starting an online business writing or it’s trying to match into a residency program you want as an aspiring physician. The sooner you work on improving your networking skills, the faster your business will improve. The benefits of networking in any business venture are obvious, so I won’t rehash them here.

Instead, I’ll tell you that from my personal experience with Project Yemen, as well as my time making a profit writing online, networking has been and continues to be extremely salient in growing any business. In fact, some of the most memorable moments from my time working on Project Yemen were the connections and tips I got from fellow startup entrepreneurs in the metro Atlanta area. Many of these people had been in the game longer than my friends and me, and attending Atlanta Startup Village meetings proved to be immensely beneficial.

This can be applied to any venture. Want to learn how to grow your blog in the COVID era of social distancing? Find virtual meetings of others looking for the same thing. I guarantee you’ll feel better and more encouraged when you’re surrounded by a community of peers, some with more experience and some with less, who you can learn from and teach. Not only will you see your own business growing directly from people you meet at these events following you, but indirectly from tips from these same people. This advice is incredibly useful to any fledgling entrepreneur, and you might just learn a thing or two that could save you from making mistakes that cost a few hundreds or thousands of dollars.

3.) The most successful self-starters capitalize on their skills and passions.

I made this one broad intentionally because many useful tips fall under this umbrella. Although this statement has both obvious and subtler implications, I’ll go over all of them for completeness’ sake. Firstly, with the amount of time it will require to make your venture successful, however you define success, it is essentially a prerequisite that you have some inherent interest and skill in the subject matter.

Let’s say you want to start an online writing business. Maybe you have years of writing and editing experience for many publications, and you like writing and feel you have tips to share that would benefit the masses. In order for you to be successful, you would need to first build a following online of readers or potential customers who would buy your product.

Then, after garnering a large enough following, you could start offering a freemium newsletter on Substack, or other products such as an e-Book with all of your tips — including some you haven’t shared online in any of your free content.