Since I’ve started this journey I’ve found everyone to be so incredibly supportive. Friends have rallied to back the idea and are confident that I’m on my way. I’ve had comments like:
– One day you’ll look back from your castle on Lake Como and laugh
And
– I think you’ll be the first dotcom millionaire that I know. You can spend your days racing Ferraris!
The reality, as I’m finding out, is that success in start ups is hard…really hard. 92% of start ups fail within the first three years. In the program that I’m on where, two months ago, there was a Zoom screen full of enthusiastic faces spread over four pages, we’re now down to just one page. The motivation is still there, but we’re all a tad more tired.
The more you delve into the life as an entrepreneur you find out that it’s less about the instant success you envisaged in the pub originally and more about surviving challenges you’d never heard of like ‘the trough of disillusionment’ or ‘the valley of death’:
Last year, when considering embarking on this journey, a friend at a start up incubator told me that ideas were cheap, ten to the dozen. Execution is everything. So it’s not enough just to have a good idea, you have to be good, focused, driven to succeed. In fact, you’re better off with an average idea being driven by the right person rather than a great idea with someone that can’t build momentum. Holy crap…I’ve got to rely on me?!…
But we’re learning, every day we’re learning. A big thank you to all those of you that responded to the call to action in my last blog. I got a great response and also learned a few things about setting myself up better. For some people the link to my Launchrock registration page didn’t work. As a result, I’ve set up my initial site now at www.a11in.co . Please feel free to have a look and let me know what you think.
I also didn’t have a link for newcomers to sign up to the blog, which I’ve rectified below. Bit of a missed opportunity that one from the bloke that is supposed to be building the momentum around this!
This week I got my hands on the 11th pre-release of the app for testing and it’s forever getting better. There are still a few bugs to iron out but I hope to be able to release it to user groups for initial public testing in the next month. Let me know if you’d like to be involved in this initial testing stage as we will need willing testers. And please keep spreading the word on what I’m doing with any people or groups you can think of that get together regularly that could use the app.
As ever, thank you for following.
This may need the right person to make it happen, but the truth is it’s you that will make it succeed.
Jules