Walling on Motives and Expectations

How do you build the resolve to actually start up?

• It’s critical to know what you want out of entrepreneurship so you can make the right decisions along the way
• Define your goals and write them down
• A Micropreneur has goals that are not limited to financial gain….being able to live where you want and work when you want is an appealing option for many founders
• Without goals you are much more likely to throw in the towel when things get difficult
  • This might be when you launch and no one buys, or…
  • You are bombarded with so many support requests you don’t have enough time to build new features
• If you are doing it for the money you will not stick around during those long months of hard work when no money is coming in
• The first month you launch you will be lucky to break $100 in revenue
• Embrace the challenge and excitement of owning [your] own business….build equity in something [you] own, and….have control over the projects [you] work on
• [Think] about your motivation for starting a startup because it dictates the type of product you should launch
• Which of the following sounds most appealing?
  1. Keeping your day job and earning extra money on the side
  2. Building a portfolio of products and quitting your day job while still writing code
  3. Quitting your day job with the intent of outsourcing the code and focusing on the entrepreneurial side
  4. Quitting your day job and running a small company where you work from home and may have a few employees
• (Quoting some study):
  • “Those who wrote their goals accomplished significantly more than those who did not write their goals.”
  • “Those who sent their commitments to a friend accomplished significantly more”
  • “Those who sent weekly progress reports to their friend accomplished significantly more”
• Public commitment and accountability….can be achieved by interacting with a community of like-minded startup founders
• Strive to build a startup that generates $500 per month in profit
  • This may sound like an easy goal, but will require more work than you can fathom
• Growing a product to the point of providing substantial income is a long, arduous road
  • As a result is far riskier than becoming a consultant because you have to wait months to find out if your effort will generate revenue
• Once you launch a product, you are instantly building equity. With every copy you sell and every improvement you make, you are building something that will not only generate income in the future, but actually has value on the open market
• Don’t expect that your work is over the day after you launch. That’s the day work really begins
• You will never feel “done.” You will always have a list of features, marketing tests, potential partnerships, and new markets to take care of
• The idea of building an application and sitting back to collect a check is, unfortunately, a pipe dream
• A product, marketing effort, and a reputation take time to build. But once they build they snowball
• Once you have 5 releases under your belt, 1500 targeted visitors every month, a 500 prospect mailing list, and hundreds of incoming links… surprise! Things are easier. Much easier
• Spend 20 minutes making a list of the things you are hoping to accomplish by starting up