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Failing at Entrepreneurship: Guys I Wouldn't Bet On.

RHL

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I want to try and keep this post positive. But over the last couple months of working with a lot of sellers and buyers of exotic cars, I've noticed something. There are a lot of guys who get into the entrepreneurship game and it ends up being worse for them than the slow-lane. I hear about these guys because these are the favorite war stories of the dealers. A guy's ebook or product has a great quarter on Amazon, so he comes in and buys a used 458. Turns out it was just a fad; dealer buys the same car back 900 miles later for $30,000 less, resells it, repeat. Sometimes I get to talk to these people at business owner networking things (which is where I find dealership clients). A couple of them I know from college, engineers who have been talking about their big idea since freshman year. Our ten year reunion is two years away.

I don't want to rag on so-called wantrepreneurs, more offer some observations as a warning. A symptom is not the same as the disease; doing these things will not mean you're going to be broke forever. But a good diagnosis exists for a reason, and I think this is one. With that said, I want to share with you some common traits I've seen in people who haven't made any forward progress. These people, IMO, do not have fastlane DNA. At least not yet.

1. People who can't work without being told what to do.
cQWtDIs.png

From the time you're born until the time you retire (if you're slow-lane or sidewalk) your life is fairly free of autonomy and options. You wake up when your job dictates you do, vacation when it dictates you can, see your kids when it lets you, and so on. You get trained when you learn to use the toilet, trained to write and read, trained to study for tests, trained in subjects in college, trained at your job, trained by parenting classes, etc. It's very rare that you will come to a juncture in your slow-lane life where the obstacle in front of you will appear in this form:

"I have absolutely no idea what to do or how to do it, and I know absolutely nobody who does either."

Yet as an entrepreneur, that kind of a thing is a daily, sometimes hourly occurrence. That feeling is the barrier to entry that forms the C in Cents. If you've managed to grow up and become an adult and don't know how to do this thing, and don't know anyone else who does, it's possible that nobody knows how to do the thing you're trying to do. And if it's something lots of other people want to do, then your inability to google a quick solution is very, very good.

In these situations, you usually end up finding a bunch of solutions to similar problems that get you part of the way there. What's left is the undiscovered country of control, but if you can't find your way without a map, you're lost as an entrepreneur. If you can only make your way forward if someone tells you the exact steps and doesn't leave anything out, you won't make it at all. I wouldn't bet on this guy.

2. People who follow their bliss instead of following the market.

gg9TFgB.jpg


I'm guilty of this. This is how my Fastlane journey started. It's been talked about to death here, but it really is a major land-mine for people. It is simply not enough to be really excited about something if it fails so many CENTS/CENTS principles that you can't make a living off of it. Because really, at the end of the day, when people say that they're "doing what they love," they're not really anyway, they're just doing something close to it, because they understand that actually doing what they'd love to do (ex. being a professional Victoria's Secret model's husband and taker of $80,000 vacations or something) isn't a thing. So they say they love being a school teacher instead, when really, they only love it a small part of the time.

If you haven't pushed hard enough to really fail at your work, then you should still do that before you write off your venture as a flight of fancy rather than a fastlane, but if you have and it really bombed, let it die. Some guys can't because they don't want to. I wouldn't bet on that guy.

3. People who need gratuitous rewards for minor achievements.

BV5sMaQ.png


Everybody knows this guy. This is the guy who rewards himself with two hours of video games for buying a domain name. This is the guy who wants $150,000 compensation when all they have is a business plan and no customers or sales. This guy is so busy being impressed with his own small victories and inconsequential "progress" that after eight months his business is still in the drawing board phase. If you can't take some austerity as you knuckle down and get to work, you're not going to make it to the finish line. You'll work without pay, you'll spend hours during the weekend, and you'll lose lots of money figuring things out. A guy who can't delay gratification for two days won't make it through a 5-10 year journey which begins with enormous hardship. I wouldn't bet on him.

4. Guys who can't make small but significant daily progress on a huge, daunting problem.

calvin-and-hobbes-on-writing.jpg


You can't cram the fastlane. You can't build up the kind of consistent, lasting reputation for customer service and quality products you need to disentangle your time from your income if you can't make inroads in manageable bits and keep the big picture in mind. There are lots of tools to help with this, heck, both MJ and a product that ran a $300,000+ kickstarter on this form make aides to help you break down your big future into manageable daily portions.

An alternative variation to this is guys who know basically what steps they need, but who front-load all the easy stuff and put off the hard stuff until the last possible minute. Logo design and filing LLC paperwork come first, filing the design patents and setting up overseas manufacturing are puttoff as long as possible. Shopping for office furniture is done on Monday, the call that will decide the fate of the company's first big contract is put off until Friday at 3:30.

If you can't take consistent daily action, you can't make amazing things happen. You can't become that 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 year "overnight" success. If you're the kind of person who only works on things sporadically, you're a bad bet.

5. Guys who spend more time visualizing the rewards of the fastlane than visualizing how they're going to help people solve problems.

l4WQJHO.gif


I know a guy from college who does this. He's constantly Facebook DMing me pictures of A Lange and Sohne watches he's going to buy when he finishes his app... that he's had the conceptual work laid out for since early 2011. At this point, if anyone cared, half the army of people he's told about it over the last half decade could have dropped $10,000 to hire a crack team of programmers and beat him to market. The worst part is, all this time, and he doesn't even know if there is a market for his idea or not. Phones are pretty different today, tech is in a different place. He could have started over with a more viable idea or, better, he could have knocked this one out in 2011, had a hit, and that would have been the first page in a portfolio of successful apps.

Whether it's looking at cars or houses or boats or clothes in the evenings, if you haven't spent years working on your business, there's no point in spending even a second thinking about this stuff. It doesn't matter what the current price for a Rolex or a 599 is now, because if you're just starting out, it'll probably be completely different when you actually have the money to buy one in five years, assuming EVERYTHING goes well. This is focusing on your own needs rather than your customers. This is the antithesis of the fastlane. This kind of thing isn't even an action fake. It's just fake period, and only an idiot bets big on a hand with no winning cards in it at all and no poker face to make up for it.

Sorry this is long, but I hope it helps some people. After all, I don't get paid based on sales commissions, so it doesn't do me any good if the dealer buys your car back from you at a fire-sale price a month after you get it.
 
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Silverhawk851

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Awesome post.

The issue I find with alot of people is the romaticization of entrepreneurship,
where people actually believe that all it really takes is
rejecting your current responsibilities, visualizing big, getting 'motivated',
and buying a domain on GoDaddy while sipping a Latte at Starbucks during a 'brainstorm session",
leasing a new 3 series BMW.

In reality, entrepreneurs work 120+ hours week, with no immediate results in sight,
getting knocked down more times in a week than the average guy does in a lifetime,
but getting back up and trying again till something gives way.

Failure is actually the gas on which their progress train runs on.

4:30am alarm clocks, 14 hour work days, maxed out CCs,
lack of anything resembling success, but continuing forever ....The struggle never crosses the mind of these wantrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is HARD and it requires you to struggle.
And the struggle is what makes you better.
I have yet to meet any successful entrepreneur who didn't have to struggle.

As Randy Pausch said:

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”


Epic write up! Rep++
 

Silverhawk851

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RHL

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Why you sleep in so late?

I have a background in classics, and there's a guy who pretty much single-handedly created one of the major resources that all students of Greek and everyone who makes a translation from Greek into English, German, French, Spanish or Chinese uses. It draws sources from basically every Greek document they knew about at the turn of the last century, and is probably pushing 2,000 extremely large (phonebook-sized) pages long.

Stories about this guy's work ethic are insane. He was a professor, but it's said he never slept more than four hours a night and never put in less than 3 hours a day working on it, six days a week, taking only Sunday off.

For FORTY YEARS.

This was on top of having a real 9-5 and a family.

And that folks is how you create a $200+ book that still sells 5,000+ copies per year in dozens of languages 100 years after you finished it, seven editions and translations into Chinese, English, French, Spanish, etc. later.

I'd bet on that guy.
 
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Chazmania

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And that folks is how you create a $200+ book that still sells 5,000+ copies per year in dozens of languages 100 years after you finished it, seven editions and translations into Chinese, English, French, Spanish, etc. later.

Some serious need solving/value creation right there.
 

Ultra Magnus

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Thanks for this post, it really rings true for me. I also have an anecdote illustrating some of your points.

A while back I was trying to get a company rep to help me solve a problem using some of their products. He said he could sell me some stuff but wasn't convinced it would actually work and gave me the number of a guy who sold raw materials instead. He said the guy could always finds a solution.

So I phone this person and we talk. I tell him that I have raw materials, but if he shows me how to do my thing without extra equipment, which he was convinced was entirely possible, I'd buy his stuff. I didn't really think it would work, having spent months trying different solutions.

Long story short, I went to his company, which makes small runs of custom plastic parts for clients, and he showed me his magical solution - a middle-aged woman, heavily smelling of yesterday's booze, who spends all her time at work trying to figure out how to make stuff as cheaply as possible without defects (which are the main problem in the industry, usually solved using expensive equipment).

I spent half a day there watching her attempt to replicate my part, without success. Both her boss and she told me that this was how it always went: they just tried things until something worked. It sometimes took them many days, but he was a distributor of raw materials, so there was no problem failing - in the end, the customer probably paid for all the stuff they wasted, and the woman had a fixed salary anyway and worked 9-5.

I was both happy and sad - I knew it was hard, but at the same time I was afraid that doing the same thing I wanted to do was probably very easy for someone with more experience than me; well, it wasn't, potential copycats would have to grind it like I did. What made me a bit sad was that distinct feeling which I've come to associate with entrepreneurship: f*ck me, I need to work on this like before, and it's going to be hard, it's going to take a long time, and I'm not getting paid until after it's done - and if it fails I'm not getting paid at all.

The moral is in your excellent post.
 
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mws87

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I want to try and keep this post positive. But over the last couple months of working with a lot of sellers and buyers of exotic cars, I've noticed something. There are a lot of guys who get into the entrepreneurship game and it ends up being worse for them than the slow-lane. I hear about these guys because these are the favorite war stories of the dealers. A guy's ebook or product has a great quarter on Amazon, so he comes in and buys a used 458. Turns out it was just a fad; dealer buys the same car back 900 miles later for $30,000 less, resells it, repeat. Sometimes I get to talk to these people at business owner networking things (which is where I find dealership clients). A couple of them I know from college, engineers who have been talking about their big idea since freshman year. Our ten year reunion is two years away.

I don't want to rag on so-called wantrepreneurs, more offer some observations as a warning. A symptom is not the same as the disease; doing these things will not mean you're going to be broke forever. But a good diagnosis exists for a reason, and I think this is one. With that said, I want to share with you some common traits I've seen in people who haven't made any forward progress. These people, IMO, do not have fastlane DNA. At least not yet.

1. People who can't work without being told what to do.
cQWtDIs.png

From the time you're born until the time you retire (if you're slow-lane or sidewalk) your life is fairly free of autonomy and options. You wake up when your job dictates you do, vacation when it dictates you can, see your kids when it lets you, and so on. You get trained when you learn to use the toilet, trained to write and read, trained to study for tests, trained in subjects in college, trained at your job, trained by parenting classes, etc. It's very rare that you will come to a juncture in your slow-lane life where the obstacle in front of you will appear in this form:

"I have absolutely no idea what to do or how to do it, and I know absolutely nobody who does either."

Yet as an entrepreneur, that kind of a thing is a daily, sometimes hourly occurrence. That feeling is the barrier to entry that forms the C in Cents. If you've managed to grow up and become an adult and don't know how to do this thing, and don't know anyone else who does, it's possible that nobody knows how to do the thing you're trying to do. And if it's something lots of other people want to do, then your inability to google a quick solution is very, very good.

In these situations, you usually end up finding a bunch of solutions to similar problems that get you part of the way there. What's left is the undiscovered country of control, but if you can't find your way without a map, you're lost as an entrepreneur. If you can only make your way forward if someone tells you the exact steps and doesn't leave anything else, you won't make it at all. I wouldn't bet on this guy.

2. People who follow their bliss instead of following the market.

gg9TFgB.jpg


I'm guilty of this. This is how my Fastlane journey started. It's been talked about to death here, but it really is a major land-mine for people. It is simply not enough to be really excited about something if it fails so many CENTS/CENTS principles that you can't make a living off of it. Because really, at the end of the day, when people say that they're "doing what they love," they're not really anyway, they're just doing something close to it, because they understand that actually doing what they'd love to do (ex. being a professional Victoria's Secret model's husband and taker of $80,000 vacations or something) isn't a thing. So they say they love being a school teacher instead, when really, they only love it a small part of the time.

If you haven't pushed hard enough to really fail at your work, then you should still do that before you write off your venture as a flight of fancy rather than a fastlane, but if you have and it really bombed, let it die. Some guys can't because they don't want to. I wouldn't bet on that guy.

3. People who need gratuitous rewards for minor achievements.

BV5sMaQ.png


Everybody knows this guy. This is the guy who rewards himself with two hours of video games for buying a domain name. This is the guy who wants $150,000 compensation when all they have is a business plan and no customers or sales. This guy is so busy being impressed with his own small victories and inconsequential "progress" that after eight months his business is still in the drawing board phase. If you can't take some austerity as you knuckle down and get to work, you're not going to make it to the finish line. You'll work without pay, you'll spend hours during the weekend, and you'll lose lots of money figuring things out. A guy who can't delay gratification for two days won't make it through a 5-10 year journey which begins with enormous hardship. I wouldn't bet on him.

4. Guys who can't make small but significant daily progress on a huge, daunting problem.

calvin-and-hobbes-on-writing.jpg


You can't cram the fastlane. You can't build up the kind of consistent, lasting reputation for customer service and quality products you need to disentangle your time from your income if you can't make inroads in manageable bits and keep the big picture in mind. There are lots of tools to help with this, heck, both MJ and a product that ran a $300,000+ kickstarter on this form make aides to help you break down your big future into manageable daily portions.

An alternative variation to this is guys who know basically what steps they need, but who front-load all the easy stuff and put off the hard stuff until the last possible minute. Logo design and filing LLC paperwork come first, filing the design patents and setting up overseas manufacturing are puttoff as long as possible. Shopping for office furniture is done on Monday, the call that will decide the fate of the company's first big contract is put off until Friday at 3:30.

If you can't take consistent daily action, you can't make amazing things happen. You can't become that 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 year "overnight" success. If you're the kind of person who only works on things sporadically, you're a bad bet.

5. Guys who spend more time visualizing the rewards of the fastlane than visualizing how they're going to help people solve problems.

l4WQJHO.gif


I know a guy from college who does this. He's constantly Facebook DMing me pictures of A Lange and Sohne watches he's going to buy when he finishes his app... that he's had the conceptual work laid out for since early 2011. At this point, if anyone cared, half the army of people he's told about it over the last half decade could have dropped $10,000 to hire a crack team of programmers and beat him to market. The worst part is, all this time, and he doesn't even know if there is a market for his idea or not. Phones are pretty different today, tech is in a different place. He could have started over with a more viable idea or, better, he could have knocked this one out in 2011, had a hit, and that would have been the first page in a portfolio of successful apps.

Whether it's looking at cars or houses or boats or clothes in the evenings, if you haven't spent years working on your business, there's no point in spending even a second thinking about this stuff. It doesn't matter what the current price for a Rolex or a 599 is now, because if you're just starting out, it'll probably be completely different when you actually have the money to buy one in five years, assuming EVERYTHING goes well. This is focusing on your own needs rather than your customers. This is the antithesis of the fastlane. This kind of thing isn't even an action fake. It's just fake period, and only an idiot bets big on a hand with no winning cards in it at all and no poker face to make up for it.

Sorry this is long, but I hope it helps some people. After all, I don't get paid based on sales commissions, so it doesn't do me any good if the dealer buys your car back from you at a fire-sale price a month after you get it.
Great thread. Is it safe to assume the guys you would bet on are the polar opposites of the one's listed?
 
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SmoothFranko

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I would add a 6th
6. The guy that has an idea but is 'forever' waiting on others.
I had this issue with my partner we had a business idea that we decided to action but I found myself waiting for a call to action from other people. for many weeks we said to each other "Alright lets work on it this week" and we'd get together do a 2 hours brainstorm and then go away and I'd think "Yeah that was good lets get some businesses done!" but then i'd be waiting for him to talk to me about or I'd do a bit of work on a business plan and he'd say "looks good" but then I'd feel like was the only one who wanted the idea to work and that lead to me doing nothing.
 

MJ DeMarco

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MARKED GOLD! Loved it, and agree.

This is also something to think about if you're entering into a "convenient" partnership with your drinking buddy. Makes for a good checklist.
 
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BaraQueenbee

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Great and accurate post.

"The infinity Wait-er", that was a little recognition-party I just had ;-)
Yes yes and yes!

Also, like several have stated before, I also believe not everyone is right to be "entrepreneur". They CAN be, but are not. It's not just a hip title one can take on, like other hype-sensitive stuff.
Eventhough I am in my early adventures when it comes to this, the more time and effort I spend for my projects, the more you see and recognize the excuses or toxic-patterns many people seem to be stuck in.

Toast to you OP!
 

obrian

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Awesome post.

The issue I find with alot of people is the romaticization of entrepreneurship,
where people actually believe that all it really takes is
rejecting your current responsibilities, visualizing big, getting 'motivated',
and buying a domain on GoDaddy while sipping a Latte at Starbucks during a 'brainstorm session",
leasing a new 3 series BMW.

In reality, entrepreneurs work 120+ hours week, with no immediate results in sight,
getting knocked down more times in a week than the average guy does in a lifetime,
but getting back up and trying again till something gives way.

Failure is actually the gas on which their progress train runs on.

4:30am alarm clocks, 14 hour work days, maxed out CCs,
lack of anything resembling success, but continuing forever ....The struggle never crosses the mind of these wantrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is HARD and it requires you to struggle.
And the struggle is what makes you better.
I have yet to meet any successful entrepreneur who didn't have to struggle.

As Randy Pausch said:

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”


Epic write up! Rep++
i think it's the media that makes entrepreneurship looks this way,they always make the entrepreneurs look like their some heroes of some sort and when you look behind the curtain of those entrepreneurs it's alot of work and while some of them are being interviewed by some news journalist at the same time they aren't giving shit about what they are saying the only thing they care about is to get back to work as quickly as possible or else their competitors are gonna catch up.

it's not easy and you got to make alot of sacrifice you got to have alot passion for what you are doing or else sooner or later it's going to show in your attitude towards your business.also alot of persons start a business for the wrong reasons and that's also one of the main reasons why some of them wannabe entrepreneurs give up.
 

nicotini

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Thank you for your post. To me the most problematic is number 5, because it's really easy to become too enthusiastic thinking about the rewards and to get distracted from the work you have to focus on. So I found it useful to stay down to earth. Cheers!
 

dsanchez

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Great post!!
But don't you think it's actually a good thing to feed your motivation seeing why you chose fastlane(material desires..)? Just if that doesn't take time of actual work..
 

Andy Black

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The issue I find with alot of people is the romaticization of entrepreneurship,
where people actually believe that all it really takes is
rejecting your current responsibilities, visualizing big, getting 'motivated',
and buying a domain on GoDaddy while sipping a Latte at Starbucks during a 'brainstorm session",
leasing a new 3 series BMW.

Yes. I don't quite understand this "motivation" thing.

So many people love Gary Vaynerchuck's videos about motivation, when he drops soooo many great knowledge bombs.


EDIT: Actually, all of "rejecting your current responsibilities, visualising big, and getting motivated" seems on the money.
 
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Richie_Sage

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Ha, this post stroke me hard. You know what I'm going to do? I don't want to forget any of this stuff, so I will internalize it, because I return over and over again to these and similar concepts. They MUST carry value and I'm sick of waving back and forth. I'm going to write your outlined sentences now and put them near my bad. F*ck.
 

Aaron W

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How can one reach the fastlane when optimzepress isn't loading!

why-wh_5483243_lrg.jpg



But seriously, awesome post.

I love the part about visualizing it.


A lot of friends always talk about the future instead of the 'doing'. Process-avoiders.


I tell them 'Cool you have an idea, start doing something to get there now'.
Even if it means Googling 'how do I register a business'.


Unfortunately this is when the excuse-machine-9000 starts working overtime...
 

IrishSpring600

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"So they say they love being a school teacher instead, when really, they only love it a small part of the time."

Generalizing, and a complete, total non-sequitur.

It literally does not follow from "Victoria's secret model husband". How did you make that jump, @RHL?

Your posts are better than this...
 

MJ DeMarco

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Andy Black

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7. The "Yes, but" guy.

No matter the solution, they find a problem.

Bet on the guy that, no matter the problem, they find a solution.
 

Scot

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Awesome thread! Here's my addition.


8. The guy that won't talk to his customers

ignore-people-at-work.jpg


He's the guy who has the great idea and just knows it'll work. He swears everyone wants his product because it's so freaking awesome. I mean, who wouldn't want it? He keeps building, and building, and building. He knows that as soon as he launches, he'll be rich.

Talk to customers? That's scary. He doesn't want to talk to people he doesn't know. He doesn't want to get awkward looks or hung up on. Even worse. He doesn't want to get negative feedback. He doesn't want to be wrong.

And when he launches, crickets. Because the market said, "we don't like this."

Build it and they will come isn't real.


I may have been that guy before...
 
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Andy Black

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Awesome thread! Here's my addition.


8. The guy that won't talk to his customers

ignore-people-at-work.jpg


He's the guy who has the great idea and just knows it'll work. He swears everyone wants his product because it's so freaking awesome. I mean, who wouldn't want it? He keeps building, and building, and building. He knows that as soon as he launches, he'll be rich.

Talk to customers? That's scary. He doesn't want to talk to people he doesn't know. He doesn't want to get awkward looks or hung up on. Even worse. He doesn't want to get negative feedback. He doesn't want to be wrong.

And when he launches, crickets. Because the market said, "we don't like this."

Build it and they will come isn't real.


I may have been that guy before...
Engineers do this a lot... they like building stuff.
 

CPisHere

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The guy that doesn't want to make the sacrifice necessary.

I'm there/been there. Building a business takes TIME (away from family/friends/hobbies) + MONEY (most likely requiring lowering your standard of living).
 

justonemore

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I want to try and keep this post positive. But over the last couple months of working with a lot of sellers and buyers of exotic cars, I've noticed something. There are a lot of guys who get into the entrepreneurship game and it ends up being worse for them than the slow-lane.

Yeah, that's reality isn't it.
It's harder to see in the online world, but the online world mirrors the brick and mortar world I have to assume. Think of some shopping centers or popular streets near you.
Think how many businesses there have come and gone, come and gone, come and gone over the years.
What percent of those businesses that aren't a major franchise have lasted for more than 3-4 years? 10%? 20%?
Then think, how many of those businesses that went away had someones life savings and 80-100 hour weeks for 4+ years wrapped up in them.

Some people don't like people who point out problems without solutions. I disagree. You need realists around you. They're the ones who will keep you from losing your life savings on a bad idea. They're the ones who will save you from wasting 80 hours a week for 4 years on an idea that will fail.
Yes men make good drinking buddies, but that's about it.

I'm not an expert in business, but I do think most failure could be avoided by aiming well, thinking things through, and then rethinking things through.

Just my opinion...
 

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