Hi all, my biz just reach a $40m valuation after a tonne of hard work but my click-bait title is designed to outline whats wrong in this Sub-reddit.
Unfortunately, most of the content here doesn't represent true entrepreneurs but rather wantrepreneurs that think you need a crazy idea to make it, you have too many great ideas and can't focus, how you make a tonne of cash without working hard.
In this post, I am just going to lay out some home truths in the hope that maybe one person may not waste their hard earned money on a silly idea, or perhaps stop daydreaming and start doing.
Entrepreneurship is NOT about big ideas
There are 5.6m employer firms in the USA, thats at least 5.6m entrepreneurs in the USA. Most of these entrepreneurs have businesses in existing industries. People today have been poisoned by click bait regarding geniuses like Mr. Zuck or Page. & Brin who have dominated their fields and created wealth beyond anyone's wildest dreams yet their ideas weren't original, Google wasn't the first search engine. It wasn't the second, not even the third.
Successful business is all about execution. A great team with a dull and mundane product are so much more likely to get succeess than a college grad with a big dream.
- If you feel that being an entrepreneur requires a big idea, you are a wantrepreneur
- If you carry a notebook with all yout great ideas, you are a wantrepreneur.
- If you have so many great ideas but just lack focus (also known as as the ability to execute well), you are a wantrepreneur
Every headhunter that starts their own headhunting firm is an entrepreneur and they aren't doing anything massively different, they just back themselves to execute better. Lawyers who make their own practices are entrepreneurs, you don't need to create the next automated legal subscription service to be an entrepreneur.
Either learn a business, get great, save up and then launch a slightly differentiated business or focus on looking for problems in the job you currently are doing.
Stop dreaming, start executing
Successful entrepreneurs spend more time empowering others to build their business
A lot of people lurking around this sub seem to relish the idea of bring their big idea to life. I have news for you; this process is maybe 6-18months of your business. The rest is incremental improvements and empowering others to grow your business further.
Maybe you are working in a 9-5 job and dreaming via this sub is a way to keep you sane but remember when you have 100 people working for you, you have 100 people potentially thinking of ways to move to the next thing. Who doesn't want to be a tech millionaire! Remember, you probably think you are under-paid and under-appreciated but every person you employ will think similar!
Even if you have the experience, drive and ingenuity to build the beginnings of a business, you can only grow it so much before you need to rely on others. If you cannot empower those people, you will not execute and you will not succeed.
A manager who knows how to empower and excite their sub-ordinates is so much more value than someone who wants to create 'strategy' all the time. If you don't have this skill yet, you will need a co-founder does or you will need to get more corporate experience
Businesses aren't built for you
Many posts on this sub talk are variants of get rich quick schemes or figuring out how to 'side hustle'. At the heart of it, many wantrepreneurs think that working for themselves will bring immense freedom and untold riches.
When you employ 100 people, you are responsible for the livelihoods of 100 people. You are priority 2 vs your staff. Businesses need people and people need to believe that their fearless leader can make great outcomes for them!
Think about that for a second. Are you mature enough to be responsible for 100 families rent or mortgage? Do you realize that a silly decision on your side could actually create financial hardship for others?
If your business is not built to make your employees lives better, your great employees will churn out and your business and you will not succeed.
When you look at your spreadsheet imaginging the $100m net income from your online bow-tie emporium, just remember, those 'staff' numbers will become real people. Be prepared to look after them.
Managing your staff well is worth 100x that zany, crazy idea…. soz
Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?
I think that by now I can call myself a successful entrepreneur and while I am a wealthy human on paper, I am grinding and saving like everyone else. In fact, my sister who is a few years younger than me and who works in law earns triple what I do whilst complaining that she doesn't have the work freedom.
If you just want to be wealthy, without the hassle of all the above, try your best to get into those premier industries and make a career out of it. If you aren't fortunate enough to be able to move into Law, medicine, finance etc then excel at what you are currently doing and then do exactly the same thing yourself.
I think that is enough of a rant. Dreaming is great because the thought of being successful can fill that emotional void but unfortunately it isn't real. Furthermore, if you think that being an entrepreneur means being the next Zuck or equivalent, you are essentially trying to replicate 0.01% of successful entrepreneurs as opposed to the 99.99% unsung business owners out there
Good luck to all!
$40m founder; telling it like it is.
byu/SIDATI666 inEntrepreneur
Posted by SIDATI666
10 Comments
Great post! Thank you.
Are you seriously basing your “$40m valuation” on that fake ass site? Is that your site?
It asks basic questions and didnt even ask for real P&L or a URL. the number is completely made up. You want a real evaluation go to Empire Flippers and give them real numbers.
Completely nullifies anything else you said.
What if a don’t feel the need of a big idea, but just one simple idea that I like , I’m still a wanterpreneur?
Man, I feel like the underlying message is a good one for folks to year (as someone who has sold 2x companies, started 5+, and makes 7 figures in profit per year from my two agencies)
BUT
Why are you so angry about it? Like, these folks who haven’t yet taken the leap need (experienced entrepreneurs) our support. I believe you can deliver the same general message without putting folks down.
Again, I get your intentions are good because I know the message is correct, just the delivery.
Pretty sure the only thing you don’t have is “great ideas”. You sound like a **red ocean** businessman who’ll sell potatoes if it’s profitable. Whereas the people in this sub with great ideas plan to venture into **blue ocean** territory. You and them are not the same breed.
I’m worried about your employees now. You must be torturing them with daily preachings of this kind:
“*Yo peasants*. I am the fearless leader who is responsible to pay your salary. You can never be like me. I take care of you. I am great, you are ordinary. Now be grateful that I took you under my wings”.
That’s a lot of word salad
Lots of butthurt comments already proving your point. It’s annoying for people lurking on here trying to learn something from people more experienced than them.
I’ll give an example. A couple of weeks ago there was a beginner question on here asking for tips on finding some success on a new PPC campaign. Fair enough. Paid ads is a skill I’d love to get under my belt, so I started going through the comments.
Toward the bottom was a downvoted comment by someone who claimed to do $1.5mil in ad spend the month before and got a good ROI.
OP then proceeded to tell this person that his input wasn’t helpful because he was at a different scale. Commenter stopped responding.
The rest of us lost out on an opportunity to learn from someone who was claiming to be light years ahead of us in a particular subject. Yes he could have been lying, but engagement and further inquiry would have made it obvious by the caliber of his responses. He wasn’t given the opportunity.
TL;DR
You have 6-7 seconds to capture my interest. Fail.
I’d argue that Google’s Page Rank concept, and using inbound links as votes for websites, was a pretty novel and clever idea.
They weren’t the first search engine, but search engines before Google really weren’t very good.
But I agree with the gist of your post. Some of my most successful entrepreneurial friends have businesses that service other businesses, and from the outside sound incredibly dull and/or literally covered in faeces. But there’s money to be made helping other people make money.
This is a great post. No beating around the bush and to the point.