My Four Month Reassessment Spiel

[DaRK9]

I took a long break from this forum and the internet in general, to focus on learning business methods and providing myself the essential building blocks for becoming a successful entrepreneur. What initially sparked this quest was my talk with @JackEdwards in July of 2014. I left the internet space in Sept 2014 and I still connect via my wonderful and understanding local Star Bucks. I now live in Northern Louisiana and I will be gone before summer hits me. (Anyone who has lived in the South understands.)

I will outline a few lessons that I have learned from my journey so far. They might be simple to some, or re-stated over and over here and in other books, but I hope it might help someone else.

I had started several projects that were whimsical in nature and had no plan for monetization. Most were fad-ish and spawned from the thought of "I just have to do something". All of which were neat ideas that provided no real value to anyone.

Which makes me ask, what happened to the threads here? My Insider has expired, which I will fix soon, but holy crap. Please do not let this turn into Warrior Forum for overly pretentious "hustlers"

I took action yes, but sadly there is more to the equation. There is a hyper-form of action faking, taking action on a fake product. They were one time payment products which could not be resold or used to keep a consistent customer base. Which leads me to my first personal lesson.

A product with a zero percent customer retainment plan sucks.

I got my first sale. That was all I needed, right?

Wrong. I quickly found that profit margins on a low scale, single sell products do not pay bills.

You need the first few sales to compound in order for growth. Otherwise your marketing budget severely limits your total margins. So either you get investors to pull through the low margins in hopes of massive orders, morph your product to find a way to resell, or die out.

Or all of the above. I now fully understand the meaning of fail fast.

I also now understand the concept of surrounding yourself with smarter people.

While this sounds simplistic at first, it ends up being harder than it sounds. Because if you view yourself as "smart", which I did 6-4 months ago, the people with the advice don't want to be around you. Every young person wants to be told how smart they are and all their dreams will come true. The problem I had was I took compliments almost as market validation. Which I now see is quite common with young or new start-ups.

Nice site! I'm sure you will do well.

Great blog post, you are going places.

Constructive criticism sometimes needs to tear you down first. A lesson which I harshly learned.

Sometimes we need someone to say "That is F*cking stupid."

Don't get me wrong, eventually we all need to take action. But its the process and knowledge created from the first action that is the real kicker.

You can either say "This is all BS, I took action." Or try, try again. I love talking about my failures, because it helps builds every little block of knowledge I have now. Sometimes when I ask again why something didn't work I find yet another slice of information.

When I was for the first time made to answer real world questions about my ideas, I was stunned at how little I knew. Yet I had the positive support from many people.

Me actually finding the "smart people"

After I realized that the people I relied on for business smarts were either secretly failing, didn't know anything at all, were just BSing, or just didn't click I set out to find brains to pick.

I thought about this for a while. I needed a job, yet I wanted my job to also be productive in my entrepreneurial side as well. So I joined the ranks of the Service Industry. I applied for the highest ranked fine dining restaurant I could find locally.

I have to say that working in this industry has changed my mindset and has really shown me what it means to provide value.

If you want to learn how to provide value, pay your rent and bills with it by waiting on customers and working behind a bar. The value you put out effects the money you receive tremendously. A great lesson for me, and I would recommend any young person here to give it a try. It's hard to understand the concept of providing value = monetary gain when you work a job where they might not be directly true when it comes to customers and money.

I have met real estate investors, lawyers, business owners, high level reps, and people from industries I would have never even heard of.

Where am I going now?

I am now in the process of creating a seed calendar and weather system for large scale farmers and hobbist gardeners. It aggregates a ton of data into one easy to use system.

Farming has not been touched for years, and a new generation of farmers are here.

I would have never guessed in a million years that I would be writing software for farms.

Keep your eyes open.

Thanks for reading my spiel. I will try to be more active on here, as I now feel I wont use this forum as a form of mental masturbation anymore.

If anyone is interested in my process for SaaS dev. Just look up Object Oriented Programming
This is the first time I can totally grasp programming and leading a programming based project.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/22769/Introduction-to-Object-Oriented-Programming-Concep

Cheers!

 

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