6 Biggest Lessons We Learned On Our Entrepreneurship Journey

Almost 1 year into entrepreneurship and 6 months after quitting our full-time jobs, here I am, trying to summarize 6 things (not 10 this time, trying to break the rut!) which we have learned in the last six months.

Totally personal experiences. Your story and journey can — and in fact, will — be very different.

1. The easiest thing in this world is to work for someone. To go and work for a large company or a multinational is easy; all comforts, minimal work and still you can demand.
2. Earning money is not the toughest thing, and if you are hardworking and smart, then certainly not. Every week, we get a new consulting opportunity, people have ideas who come & talk to us as they are looking for partners to execute their ideas. So if you are, in general, a hardworking, smart, and dedicated person, then entrepreneurship will not be a big change for you.
3. Never start alone. Building a company (especially in our part of the world) is tough. There will be so many things to do that it’s impossible for one person to do everything and still build a great company. So as our friends at YC say, the ideal is 2 to 4, and 3 is the golden number.
4. Dividing our responsibility areas with 3 Ds is very effective: design (product), distribution(marketing), delivery (ops). Of course, these are broad areas and some sub-functions will be there but broadly the 3 Ds are working well for us so far.
5. It is okay to fail or make mistakes once in a while. It prepares you for the worst. every year 700k new companies start in the Americas and 675K fail. You want to be in that successful 25k, but it is possible that you might not be. And that is okay, the trick is to try hard and with all sincerity.
6. EQ (emotional quotient) is more important than IQ, especially among co-founders. You might not be as upbeat as him/her one of these days, you might be thinking very differently at times, but give each other time and space to recover and bounce back is extremely important to your success. Back up each other, it’s a team game in the end!

Let me know what you thought and share your own lessons with me in the comments section.