Harsh mistakes I’ve learned from as an entrepreneur
When launching a new company or idea in early stages, it is extremely hard to find support from the market and investors, as opposed to popular belief. That was a very hard lesson to learn because you spend a lot of money and take a big risk on yourself, but may end up losing it all because there isn’t any investment or support.
Not just that, but most service providers also don’t offer their support because they’re not used to working with startups. They mostly work with big already well established companies and have their service packages setup/priced accordingly.
If I need marketing or legal services, for example, all the companies that provide these services are used to serving larger clients. They would offer long-term retainer packages that startups cannot take because they’re not sure they can even survive that long in the market — they would prefer something for a month or two at first.
Even in their proposals they show examples of serving huge companies and multinationals, but as a startup I’m not interested to see that. I’d like to see what they can offer small business like mine and help take them from the group up, not just helping huge/stable companies become even bigger!
The biggest mistake I learned from is spending too much time, money, and effort on the product but not on the marketing. In the end, marketing is more important than the product itself. For example, if someone had a budget of 100k, they should spend only a quarter of that on the product and the rest on the marketing… because if you have a great product but people don’t know about it, due to the lack of publicity and promotion, it won’t go anywhere.
What are some of the mistakes youy have learned from in the business world?
