5 Important Lessons I Learned From Trying To Start a Business

Ideas are awesome. Sharing them is also awesome. Let’s make this normal

I am a software developer that has tried to get out of the industry and into the entrepreneurial world for about 5 years now.

I tried a lot of ideas but didn’t manage to bring any of them to light. I watched a lot of videos and read a lot of articles and books on how to do it and what I need to do it. Did not help either. But I persevered!

I got up after every failure and I tried again. I am still trying right now.

The road is hard and I learned a lot of stuff about what I did wrong and what I did well, about what to change and what to keep.

But … why 🧐?

The question that I had to answer for myself was Why? Why spend the time and energy? It seems obvious why would anybody do this, right? For the money 🤑🤑 . But that was not the case for me. As a programmer in Romania, you earn more than enough money to do almost anything.

Looking deeper I realized that I want this because I was afraid. I was afraid that the industry, that I was very dependent on, will crash. And when that will happen my stability will go with it. I want to find alternatives so I am prepared for the case when the industry will fail.

After some time I earned more faith in myself and in my skills. I realized that I could manage even if the industry would collapse. I have the energy and the mind to learn anything and start again. But killing the fear did not make me stop wanting this.

So a few years back I asked myself once again, WHY? That is when I discovered another desire inside me.

I want to make a difference. I want to have a legacy

That idea was new for me. It is selfish. But also not selfish. It is about helping others, increasing the light of the world, and spreading confidence and good feelings.

Finding the why? was very important. The why? is the drive the pulls me up in the morning. It is what makes me sit in front of the computer and work, not scroll on social media.

It is still not enough. I still failed 2 projects after it 😅. But it was a very important step.

I got up and tried again? How?

I am incredibly lucky. I am also an atheist so I don’t even know who I am supposed to be grateful for it. But I am!

Thank you, Nature, Gods, the randomness of the universe, the fluctuations in vibration, whomever or whatever is responsible for my luck. Thank you!

I am lucky enough to feel the difference in myself every time I failed. I am lucky enough to realize how I’ve grown and what I’ve learned from every experience. I am lucky enough to look past the failure and see the lessons I learned.

I am lucky enough to look back and see what I did wrong. I am also lucky enough to believe that I will learn my lesson or to forgive myself if I don’t and give myself another chance.

Every project I started thought me something. Here are the most important 5 seasons I learned.

Timing and family support

In my first project, I built, with a friend of mine. I was still in college back then.

After we finished, the client was super happy with the project and wanted some more stuff implemented for him. The problem for me was that the client was from the USA and I had to work late in the evenings to be able to talk with him. At the same time, my son was a baby in that period and I was not able to help my wife with the household and with the baby because of the work. So we dropped the projects.

There was a decision there and I chose my family.

For me, it was hard to shift from a normal job towards an entrepreneurial one. I was very young and I did not know what and how to do it. There were a lot of unknowns to discover and fights to have. It was important not to fight my family as well in the process.

I wanted the support of my family 👪.

Control over emotions and how to separate work from life.

A few years later I tried again. I got, with another friend, a project to create a mobile application. We worked on it for 2 months. After that, we did another one that took us 6 months to deliver.

The problem was that in all those 8 months I was 100% of my time stressed and working. If I was not at the computer coding I was thinking about future meetings and problems in the project.

I realized that is impossible for me to detach from work and I would not be able to relax.

Work-life separation is very important. All the family support in the world will vanish if you are absent 100% of the time.

Set a time after which you stop working

The team is very important. It is hard to do it alone.

Go forward a few years and I tried again. This time I got to know myself better, learned a few tricks on how to detach from work. I got 2 friends, started a company, went into a government financing program, developed a product, and searched for clients.

After 3 months from the start, I was the one that developed more than half of the app, although we were 2 developers, I was the one that implemented the government finance, I was the one that talked with the clients and the one that understood the product and it’s possibilities.

What happened was that the other programmer got a better paying job and he lost the incentive for the project, and our other colleague, that should have done the administration and client work was very negligent and lazy.

I managed everything and it crushed me after 6 months. It was too much and I could not share the responsibility.

I learned 2 lessons here

1. Ask for help. Don’t do everything. Split the work.

2. The team must be on the same page with you. You must have the same goal and the same pull towards it.

Be courageous. Share your work.

At some point, a friend of mine came to me with an idea. I was very enthusiastic about it because that has never happened before, for someone to come to me with an idea.

This means that finally, I can work with someone that is interested and driven. Awesome.

But in the end, we did not get to find clients for our product. Not because it was a crappy product, but because there was no one there to buy it. Nobody knew about it.

We kept it all for ourselves. We did that for 2 reasons

What if someone will make it and take all of our clients?

And

What if they will laugh at it a d would say it is not good?

I realized that these are incredibly important parts

Share your work early. Get feedback and adapt. It is easy to change when you do have not a lot to change.

People will not steal your idea, more likely will join you in building it or offer advice. Have faith and be strong 💪.

Also, people are awesomely polite and nice. They will not offend you, but try to offer constructive criticism. All of them have been there where you are and they know how hard it is and how much good advice would have helped them.

Have faith in people and be adapt

Money is needed. Some money needs to be spent.

The next project I did was a very nice game-like Android application, that would help people learn about the interesting parts of the world in a series of treasure hunting adventures. I was extremely proud of it. I created it and I launched it.

After all that it was time to advertise it. I went to Facebook and Google and posted a series of self-made banners and one video advert. I spent 2 weeks on the video and one week prior doing some research on how to create and edit advert videos.

After I posted them I bought advertisements for 5 cents/day.

It did not work. I didn’t get one download.

Why?

Well the app looked bad, the adverts were not interesting and focused on the wrong people, probably, and they were not displayed to enough people.

Practically, everything that was out of my expertise was bad.

Every time I started I thought that my skills can cover everything. I would do the development, the design, the marketing, the delivery. I would always say that “I pay with my time”.

It does not work that way.

It is important to learn new skills, and it is important to develop yourself, but this comes at a price. You are either satisfied with the mediocre work you do until you learn how to do it properly. Or you spend the necessary time to learn how to do it properly and then you do it.

Pay for specialists. They earn you more than time

Now I am applying all that I learned

• I work in the mornings when I don’t take away the time with my family.
• I change focus from work when I stopped working. I am present and mindfull
• I refused collaboration with someone if I know we have different views
• I share my work and my ideas everywhere. I started writing on Medium so that I train my sharing muscle.
• I pay for the design and marketing of my app

I still have a lot to learn, but I am getting there.

If you are interested in someone else’s experiences with trying to start a business and what they have learned read Tim Denning’s article about his lessons.

If you want to know how I managed to find my WHY, I applied the technique I talked about here:

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