No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
There are lots of myths and dreams attached to starting a company. Will you be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg? Will you negotiate million dollars rounds of financing with cool VCs?
This is what starting a company really means: e-mailing 100 strangers a day, every day. For the foreseeable future.
That’s it. Of course, there will also be coding involved, but as most founders are programmers, you already know what that looks like. It’s the CEO part that sounds mysterious and fun, when really it’s just contacting people you don’t know to ask/beg for favors. Asking the press to cover you. Asking bloggers to link to your new site. Asking middle managers in larger companies to agree to meet with you.
The stressful part for first-time founders is asking strangers. People you don’t know. That’s quite uncomfortable at first. But you get used to it. Quickly, you’ll learn that sending the e-mail doesn’t actually cost you anything. If you don’t ask, for sure you’ll never get what you want. So eventually rather than wondering “should I send an e-mail to XYZ”, you just do it.
Again and again. Hundreds of times a day.
That’s how you earn your CEO wings.
PS: this post stemmed from a discussion with a recent Founder Institute grad.
Hmmm, I send maybe one cold e-mail a month. I guess I'm not an entrepreneur.
Can you comment on the types of emails you are sending? Is that a reflection of the need to create network effects, for your particular company?
I disagree that emailing strangers makes you a entrepreneur. But, I do agree with the spirit of what you're saying that to be a successful entrepreneur you do have to step out of your comfort zone and contact those that you don't know.
-JP
You are so right! Great note!
And this doesn't just go for marketing, or advertising, it goes for funding, and recruiting too.
It's funny, just today, I was thinking about how I should step out of my comfort zone to recruit aggressively for my projects.
Let's see. You e-mail service providers. You e-mail investors and VCs. Potential users. Press and bloggers. People you met once at a party in case they can recommend a good developer.
I wasn't talking about spam. You are e-mailing all these people with legitimate business reasons, not just pushing a product. You may have met those people informally. But you are very often in the position to try to establish the first dialogue with them.
Also, e-mail is so key. 10 years ago, people used to “go outside the building” to meet their customers and everyone else, but now it has changed a lot. I didn't go into details, but for people whose e-mail you can't find, you may ping them on twitter or facebook and hope they reply.
i guess that's not all of it..but i agree.. you got the point of it..nice post
He didn't say that that makes you an entrepreneur – he said that is one thing that he has to do as an entrepreneur that he wasn't expecting.
There was another post, I think about a year ago on HN, where a founder pointed out that he ended up cleaning the company's toilets until they could afford to hire a janitor. There are all kinds of jobs that need to be done for a business to function that many people don't realize beforehand.
Big picture, but Steve Case gave a great talk at Stanford a few months back at E-Week. For him it was the 3 P's: People, Passion and Perseverance. Sounds like you've figured out the perseverance part. Hang in there! http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo….
i rally happy to visit and A bit redundant but… no one told me it's so hard!
You surely know what you are talking about.
well, Getting Easier in This Day and Age … Peter Bentley, has an iPhone he really loves!
I completely agree with you. I got off the ground on my internet business by contacting and trying to network with hundreds of different webmasters. Some said no, some said hell no, and others decided to help me out. It ain't easy but its got to be done.
I thought that in day & age most people were pretty comfortable contacting people,
The art of pitching & approaching people is more relevant that firing up a mail client …
I would have tought that the hardest part of being a CEO is bringing culture into the company & product, a rare skill is being able to morph the product when you've headed the wrong way,
which can be a reason why most startups fails …