The hardest part about starting a new business
Finding an idea is tough. Deciding yourself to actually start it is even tougher. It’s what makes you an entrepreneur. Getting your first angels and investors is also very tough. Product-market fit is another one.
“The hardest thing is by far finding the right early people who will trust you to join you when nothing exists. They need to be highly talented, motivated, trustable, nice, ego-less, hard working, complete each other and little crazy” says Ouriel Ohayon.
I agree with all the above but for me the most difficult is finding the first ten customers.
Make your first customers really happy. They will talk to ten more so you get to one hundred customers and then you maybe you can aim at a thousand.
“Fail fast is for suckers” says Jason Lemkin. It may take years.
I try to think about what I want my new business to be in ten years.
It is easy to look at successful businesses such as Hootsuite. I remember Ryan Holmes when he had less than ten people. Hootsuite is an overnight success that took ten years. He focused early on his first very few customers. Now Hootsuite has more than 1,000 employees.
I have just opened Leade.rs — my service to help events find great speakers. We have 300+ amazing speakers in technology with about 50% diversity (never enough, but it’s a start).
All I’m focusing on right now is to find my first ten customers.
We cannot wait to make a few corporates really happy by finding speakers for their next event. Just submit a (quality) speakers request on leade.rs if you have an upcoming event or email me back if you are interested.
Note that we are 1/ focusing on paid opportunities and 2/ we paused adding new speakers as we need to focus on the event organizers but you can join the wait list.
Random:
Photo above: I woke up in beautiful Lisbon this morning after a few days at WebSummit that also took ten years to become so big. Congrats Paddy!
I posted on Twitter and on Facebook the same question about the toughest to start a business
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes” — Oscar Wilde h/t Romain
I should read rework again, definitely in the small is beautiful early theme.
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