Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Eva Piperevska, Marketing Manager at Envoice.
Launching your own business can be life-changing decision and can last forever. Starting your business can take you away from boring jobs, hateful bosses and long hours traveling to the office and back. It can give you the flexibility to work whenever you want, wherever you want.
As an entrepreneur you can choose your own hours, choose with whom you would like to work and build something you had always dreamed off. In short, you will make money and have fun doing what you want.
But starting a business in never easy. We all dream of starting something on our own, conquering markets in six months time and having millions of users worldwide.
The chances of this actually coming true are one in a million.
In reality, 90% of all startups die in the first six months after they are launched. According to the founder of Y Combinator, startups fail mainly due to:
Building a business from an idea is not an easy task. It takes teamwork, dedication, time, courage, determination and stubbornness.
Our experience shows exactly that. Early on, we knew that determination was key for the long run. The following key points are what we learned over the years based on our own experiences; I hope they will help guide you in your idea-to-business journey.
We started Emit Knowledge, with the goal of creating a sustainable research and product development company with focus on optimizing existing processes with technology.
We knew we had to learn as we grew. Essentially when you start the only thing you are good at are your professional skills. To run a company you need so much more than your basic professional skills, including: assembling a team, management, taking care of the team, sales, marketing, communication, legal, finance, you name it. Every day you learn something new, you try and measure and learn from the results.
We got our first customer one month after opening the company. It was a great experience and we are still close friends and business partners with the client.
In our case, our business was bootstrapped by our savings. We just made sure that we had enough funds in our bank account for 3-4 months until income started rolling in.
If we could go back and change one thing, it would be this: Laser focus on the company goals. Sometimes we forget why we started the business in the first place. To move forward one must know where they came from, inflect and learn.
Running a small business is a serious full-time job. It requires several strengths: excellent know how, a great team and subtle marketing that will distinguish you from the rest of your competitors. We hope you take our experience as an example and we wish you good luck with your business!