| I know extremely successful people and all of them made huge mistakes in their lives. But I don't believe you are using a good strategy here and find your advice is bad: 1. You should quit as soon as possible is you are getting nowhere. We don't need more miserable entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is probably not for you if you fail consistently. Don't waste your live doing something you are miserable at. 2. Each failure can really hurt you, no different from making a mistake while skiing or driving. It can destroy your life: Your relationships, your wealth and health. 3. You don't automatically improve as time passes. Specially if you learn on your own without good teachers. You will acquire "bad practices" or "vices" like if you try to learn to play tennis on your own: It will take you longer to "unlearn" your vices than if you learned from good teachers. The first thing I would recommend is that you make friends that are entrepreneurs so you learn from each other and support each other. I sense a very individualistic behavior from your writing but I see customers as friends and that helped me a lot. I give them way more value that what I extract to support my business, and that is the secret. People are not stupid, in the same way children "sense" who really loves them fast, customers could sense very fast the value you give them. You also develop over time a good intuition on the value you are creating if you know how to listen to your custommers.
You don't need 12 years for that, 1 or 2 years is enough. I understand that "what does not kill you makes you stronger" but I have experienced what failure feels, and it really can kill you, emotionally, mentally, socially and finally physically. The way to success is making mistakes frequent and small, so small that it can't hurt you: Instead of risking a million dollars you risk a thousand and escalate. Instead of making mistakes you meet the people that have done what you want and you learn from THEIR mistakes, so you don't need to repeat them. They will help you and love to do so. Dozens of entrepreneurs have helped me when I just asked them and some of them are good friends now. |
I see it this way as well. I serve a small niche, and some specific problems therein. I really want the people with these issues to have my solution. It sounds lame but that is more of a motivation to me than the money. Broken thing turns into fixed thing that resumes generating value for the customer. That endpoint is my goal.
I won't devalue my efforts by underpricing, people should pay a fair price. But the money is not the primary driver. If either profit or passion were not there I would probably just do something else.
My equation seems to be that if I get at least a few customers, enough to cover my out-of-pocket costs, then I'll take a risk on my time getting eventually paid for.