I like playing entrepreneur but I don't know if I could be one
I plan, research the market, figure out the audience, come up with pricing, aggregate competitors. The basic things before jumping into any project.
But once I finish the project, the doubts start tumbling in. Can I do this? What if I don't make any money? What if someone laughs in my face at how stupid my idea is? I end up throwing my hands up in the air from all the perceived obstacles and search for a new project. Rinse and repeat.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my TED talk. I'm surprised there isn't a Rant/Ramble group. I ended up stuffing this into Ideas and Validation.
This is one of the more concise TED talks 😉.
You can turn your weakness into a strength by flipping your perspective. IH is a very supportive community and they can serve as a low pass filter for what I’ll suggest.
You seem to write quite well and already do the hard work of researching a market, but appear scared to take risks on your findings, you can at least sell your skills and allow other people test the waters.
Publish your findings in a report format (think Gartner, Forrester, IDC etc) that you host on your blog or a GitHub repo, if you are feeling really generous. Don’t overthink it, just tidy up your existing notes into something bite-sized—nothing too long, nothing too short—since we are in an attention-economy.
Share the link here on IH as you have done with this post to solicit feedback. The level of community participation will give you a sense of the viability of the report format or the idea explored in the research report or both; and perhaps a few requests seeking to partner with you.
Return to step 1. Eventually, word will spread within the IH and other water coolers where you lurk about your bite-sized reports, giving you the confidence to at least start a paid newsletter or swing for the fences and execute on a research topic that holds the most promise.
Profit!
HTH.
What's the smallest thing you could launch?
The fear and anxiety associated with 'what could go wrong' is common for all of us. It's there as a protective mechanism... but sometimes it's overly sensitive.
@Pharlap Fake it till you make it. Never give up!
Self-doubt is so real, I have been doubting myself as well. I just ran a company for 18 months and it was failure upon failure and I burned through 1 million USD of investor's money.
But I think it is all a process of learning what you know and don't know, and as long as you're critical about yourself and keep improving, one day you might get it. That's how I like to think about it. Or you can focus on the parts you're good at and find a partner to work together.
Many ways to do it - let's keep trial and error together! :)
Love the self-awareness.
Something that a lot of people go through (including myself for the last few years until recently)
I'd say just put it into perspective. Whats the alternative if I don't finally start?
Think about the future when you're old and living with regret.
But maybe you're not an entrepreneur and thats totally ok!!
Build the skills you'd need for your dream job!
I feel you man.
We all get this. The key I think is thinking about it like this: can you learn from the project? If the answer is yes, then pursue it. Whether it succeeds or fails is irrelevant if your goal is just to learn from it. If you're worried about public embarrassment from the failure, this can also cover you, as you can just say it's an experiment you hope to learn from, and you're not fussed about the outcome.
Time will pass, so you may as well let it pass with a live project, as at least that way there is a chance of success. If nothing is live and you keep changing your idea, the odds are zero.
I appreciate it's hard not to be outcome independent, so if you are struggling, just set some metrics for each project you start. Eg, if you cannot get a single paying customer in 3-6 months you end that experiment and move onto the next. Just ensure you allow a decent amount of time for each, as no success is created overnight; and put in the work to plug it.
Hope this helps buddy, we've all been there with the doubts, even when we do have revenue.
Hi Pharlap, just wanted to say I can relate to what you are saying. I often feel my insecurities come up after I've "finished" a project so I quickly move on to the next..
I also agree with @c0nsilience. 'doing the work' is not enough to be successful or to be called an entrepreneur.
P.s
If you are looking for a partner to share the load with, let me know :)
That's 100% me. I have so many 90% finished projects I let fall off, or projects that I finish and share in a few places and move on. Mostly because I don't think they're good enough so I don't want to push it on other people.
For my latest project I'm going to try to do it different. I'm just going to launch my MVP to a select few people who are interested and keep building it until it's "perfect" before launching it to a larger crowd. Not the most efficient method but at that rate it will hopefully be validated and concrete enough for me to not get cold feet.
I'm glad to hear you are taking a different approach and hope it will lead to your project's success.
feel free to share it here or in DM
Please take this as constructive criticism and nothing more: outside of validating that there is a market, researching competitors and every other factor from your first paragraph has little to do with entrepreneurship. What you’ve described is what established companies do. Many of them do this poorly.
An entrepreneur needs three basic attributes:
-Can you solve a problem for people?
-How well can you execute solving this problem?
-No fear of failure. Just the opposite, in fact.
All of these combined make up the grit that is entrepreneurship. If you add a large dose of luck, you become a multi-billion dollar unicorn.
Don't try to start A business. Start THE business. The one you think about every day, because the subject matters to you deeply.
That's what's necessary for the long haul. At least, from where I'm sitting.