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by armanm
1208 days ago
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I'm about to launch a bootstrapped project on my own (my third idea). Your post really resonated with me because I have been thinking about the same feelings and outcomes as you shared in your blog. My conclusion is that the only guaranteed outcome from ventures like this for people like us (who are trying to build wealth from nothing) is and should be the learning. I have accepted that today I don't know how to create wealth by building a SaaS product and I want to immerse myself in that problem enough to learn more. Building my product is my teaching instrument. When you have a full time job, a family and other responsibilities this a hard thing to justify because you sink so much time into it; time which you are taking away from yourself and your family but this is what it takes to succeed IMO. I am sure that I will fail but there is no other choice except to assess what doesn't work, adjust, rinse and repeat until I figure it out. Some of us get lucky and struck success early but others will have to try again and many will never succeed and that's just life and nothing is free in life (unless you come from money but then again I've never been in that position either). |
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Imagine going into a meeting with a potential customer and saying "Hi, my name's armanm, and I'm looking forward to our chat today about how I'm creating wealth for myself." They would probably walk out of the room!
If there's any one commonality I've observed across almost all the successful business owners I've met, it's that they're intensely focused on one or more customer problems. They've picked a market that they know well (meaning they know a lot about it, and they also know a lot of people who are in it). And they ultimately spoke with hundreds or thousands of people in that market, figured out where there was a common need and how much everyone was willing to pay to fulfill that need, and they they came up with a solution. They're usually so obsessed with solving this problem their customers have, that it's hard to get them to talk about anything else!
If you approach it as a personal or passion project to fulfill your own goals, the response of the market will probably be lukewarm because your pitch, your product, or any other number of things probably won't be calibrated correctly. Whereas if you dedicate yourself to understanding, mastering, and solving a pressing problem for a bunch of people who want to spend money, you have a much higher chance of success.
One way that your own interests definitely factor in is when you have personally been a member of that market, experienced the need yourself and would be willing to pay for the solution and have spoken to a bunch of other people who feel the same way. That's a long list of criteria but if you meet them all you have a very high chance of success. That's why the average age of a successful entrepreneur when they found their company is 42. It takes years and years to acquire all the knowledge and meet all the people but once you do, it becomes vastly easier for the rest to fall into place.