A bunch of experiences to share

[Mexanik]

I've tried on a few entrepreneurship journeys and failed greatly so far. Just wanted to share my experience(s), hoping that it might help some of you and I might get some words of wisdom:

Online Print-out Service
Well, my very first serious dive into the business world. A couple of students from the university said that they have a great project in mind – a website that will provide print out service to students (including delivery to dorms). Till then I have never earned any real money (except scholarship and printing something at home for 20 cents/page, lol), so I decided to dive in and give it a try. We went on and agreed with a printing office for a very low fee, bought a small printer for emergency cases and proposed students to print and deliver wherever requested at the lowest possible price in the market. We would be earning 0.5 cents per page. Well , being student myself, I knew that students print out over 2-3k pages a semester and sometimes even more. Doing simple math, 2,000x0.5=$10 per student per semester. Even 1,000 established users would generate a 10 grands per semester, which was by far more than what I wanted at the time (and our university had about 25,000 students). Of course, there were four of us… I am not and was not greedy back then, but working 25 hours a day to see your “partners†fool around and have fun isn't much of a joy. I worked, worked, worked and we launched the website. I was spending time between classes to fix this, fix that, deliver print outs to dorms late in the day, blah-blah-blah. I was doing almost all of the work and didn't want to print out any copyrighted materials (We don’t really have legal issues, but I honestly have a huge admiration to all the hard work that’s being put to write books). So it was either them, or me. I met with them and agreed to provide a small portion of income to them and pushed them out of project. They were not really doing anything, so this didn't impact the business. My performance in classes started to decline. I didn't have ANY time to sit and reconsider everything, try to find some people to work with/for me and I decided to stop the project. We earned a “huge†$100 and a printer from this.

No, I didn't learn any lessons. I thought I did, but following failures showed that I really didn't. (To be continued…)

Lessons that should have been learnt from this?

• You need to very carefully pick partners, agree on terms. Having very many partners isn't always a good thing. What is each partner going to do?!
• Never dive directly to coding. You need to do a hell lot of research, preliminary sketching, designing, reviews, etc. before you even start to code it.
• You need to have time (or in project engineering terminology – resources)! Evaluate whether it’s feasible at all to spend some more of your time. Do you have any left? What is of higher priority in your life? Are you ready to take risks?
• (There is also victimization theme here, but let's leave that one to the book)

Well, there’s definitely more than that to be learnt and not to be done ever again. Would be glad to hear your comments on this.

 

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