RE: Top 5 Most Common Startup Mistakes: It's Gonna Work Out Because I Know It Will
What's also a problem is when your idea gets validated by everyone you talk to. Everyone says 'That's an amazing concept. Why didn't anyone else do it?'
So you dive in, do the hard work, spend the money and get..... nothing. Everyone still loves your idea, but for some reason just don't want to participate, even for free.
I think the biggest thing to learn from this - and most people should go through this experience at least once in their lives, is knowing when to pull the pin and get back to the real world. Following your dreams is a good thing to do, but following dreams doesn't pay the bills.
I think the one thing we didn't have was a Dragos Roua to guide us and show us how to make our project succeed.
Next time, I think i know who I'm gonna talk to first ;-)
That's very kind of you, Trevor, but I wish I wouldn't be such an expert on failing at stuff. :)))) What I learned, I learned myself the hard way. And I try to protect others as much as I can.
Yes, following your dreams is fabulous. But only if you can do it without going into debt. And that's very tricky because when you get money from investors (angel investor, friends or VCs, doesn't matter) you don't consider that as being debt, which is false.
We didn't go down the route of getting investors.
I don't feel right playing with other people's money.
And we didn't have to go into dept for it either, as I did most of the work, and got family involved to help with the rest of it.
It turned into a family thing, which would have been really cool if it had worked out.
I look at it this way - you learned to run very long distances. but first you had to learn to walk. You fell down a lot at the start. but then you got the hang of it. You still fell down, but not as often.
Once you got the hang of walking you then learned to run. If you look at how you ran as a child and how you run now, the two things are not like each other at all.
The more you learn, often by failing, the better you get. Without failure you can't have success.
From my perspective, even though my project didn't continue, I don't really consider it a failure as such. It didn't work, but I learned a lot.
I succeeded in learning how not to do this. I learned more about my family. I learned how to shut things down when they are not working.
So now I have learned to walk, the next step is running. I know I will fall over again. But I will also be doing more than those who never learn or have the courage or creativity to 'walk'.
And by any measure, that's success.
And the family enjoyed doing our small part , we were learnibg more about ,moden to us , hi tech stuff and having fun doing it , now it learning steemit stuff, I almost feel sorry for my son and teacher