Here's My Biggest Mistakes In My First Startup

I started my first business when I was 23 years old. I just came back from Australia where I backpacked for two years and tried to save some money to be successful entrepreneur. Guess what… It didn’t happen with my first venture. I ended up in debt and pushed myself so much that I was grinding my teeth so much that my girlfriend had to wake me up in the middle of the night.

So what would I have done differently?

I just wrote a blog post about it but I’ll bring some of the stuff out here as well. If you want to read the blog then click here: My Two Mistakes With My First E-commerce business

No enough capital!

When I started out I had about 2000€. That was all the money I had. I earned it the hard way working in the farm in Australia. I decided to go all in with most of the money and bought inventory for it. My plan was or at least I thought that I make enough money first month and I can pay myself next month to cover my every day needs like food, rent etc.

Like Mike Tyson says “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

That’s what happened to me. After a month I had no money to cover my everyday needs and I had to take money out of the business. I took the pennies what I earned with the first sales. That wasn’t even enough to cover my everyday needs. And that was the point where my debt started growing like a snowball rolling down the hill.

Lesson learnt – Always plan ahead for at least 6 months so you don’t have to take money out of your business and you can use that money to grow your business.

Don’t start alone, have a co-founder!

If you start out then you have no money and probably no team either. At least it was for me like that. It’s better if you don’t start alone and have a co-founder. Then you can share ideas and thoughts with someone else. If you are alone then you are doing everything. But the truth is that you don’t know everything and that’s the reason you’re going to make a lot of mistakes and these mistakes are costing you a lot of money. I tried to build a team but I had no revenue and no money to pay anyone else and it looked like other people didn’t want to suffer with me “being an entrepreneur”. I just couldn’t find a person who would have been ready to work with me side by side without getting paid. Even if I offered them equity they said no.

I am not trying to find excuses why I didn’t succeed but that was just the way things were with my first business. If I’d had the knowledge what I have right now then the outcome would be totally different. Like I said before “It’s my first time living and if you do something for the first time then it’s obvious that you’re going to do mistakes.”

Lesson learnt – Always have a co-founder if you start out to build business. It’s a lot easier and you don’t have to carry all the stress by yourself.

That was my first business and my biggest mistakes. Sometimes I think about it and wonder. If I wouldn’t have made all these mistakes and ended up in debt then maybe I wouldn’t be where I am today. When you make bad decisions then it takes time to recover and when you’re building a business then time is your biggest friend. But it’s extremely hard to understand it when you are in a bad situation. That quote doesn’t help you much. You just need to survive and get through it.

Now few years later I can run my business from my laptop and live where ever I want. It’s amazing how things can change if you are ready to change.

This post is originally from my personal blog: https://thegameontop.com/2017/06/30/my-two-mistakes-with-my-first-e-commerce-business/

Best of luck!