10 Reasons why you should start a company?
When I look back at the day I decided to go fulltime with Stoned Santa, I laugh, and wonder how I gathered the courage to sell this idea to my parents, and move to Bangalore.
One of the things I told my dad to sell this idea — “I will not ask you for money, and manage myself.”
To live up to that promise, I called up my friend, and mentor — Zeeshan, the Co-Founder of MyCaptain, and asked him for an internship in his venture, and told him of my plans of moving to Bangalore, and work on my startup, while I build skills working with his team.
4 beautiful years of learnings, hardships, failures, and wins, I moved away from my fulltime role at Stoned Santa, in July, 2020, and in this blog I share 10 ways in which working at a startup moulds you, and upgrades your thinking.
1. You learn to solve problems
Startups are all about solving problems, and while you’re attempting to startup, you learn to -
- Identify problem(s), filter/prioritize them
- Figure out a way to solve the given problem with available resources
- Make the solution efficient with feedback, and experience
Entrepreneurship is a series of encounters with problems of varying sizes, and the beauty of it — “The number, and complexity” of the problems keep increasing with time.
2. Explore yourself
While you’re solving problems It allows you to explore yourself, and begin the process of inward learning, where you learn a lot about yourself, and this process opens up a multitude of possibilities that allow us as individuals to make the most out of our potential.
My entrepreneurial experiences taught me a lot about myself, and the mere observation of my habits, and patterns helped me improve on it.
3. Build Skills
In the first few months of my startup journey, I learned to actively sell, and soon enough I was exploring forms of marketing on Social media sites, with time it progressed to more scalable forms like — SEO, ADs, and so on.
Little by little, layer by layer, my startup helped me pick up skills, that I never thought I’d be able to build. I learned a little bit about sales, marketing, writing, storytelling, digital marketing, and most importantly — “Learning how to learn”.
Today I am no longer associated with my startup, but the skills I picked up helped me get my first job, and I can already sense it’s compounding effect on my life.
4. Extreme ownership towards work
For a long time I found myself blaming others for my miseries. When I had to quit my startup, I blamed it on Corona, but in the time I spent trying to make peace with my decision, I learned that only I am responsible for myself.
Working at a startup teaches you to take extreme ownership of your work which is a desirable trait in the professional world, but may feel like a terrible trait to have.
5. Teaches you patience and perseverance
I thought I will get it soon, I didn’t. Anything that you do will take longer than you have imagined, and there are chances that you will want to give up on your way, and every time you rise through, you become stronger.
Building a startup is a great way to learn patience, and develop grit.
6. People skills
One cannot run a company alone, and I learned this only after years of trying to do everything myself, and I am grateful to have met so many people who allowed
7. Opens your mind up to new perspectives
My work at Stoned Santa involved meeting, and interacting with a lot of people who belonged to a diverse set of backgrounds — Artists, poets, entrepreneurs, etc, and while I did interact with them, I learned to see the world with a fresh view.
If you do a startup, you open up a whole world of possibilities just because your way of looking at the world has evolved.
8. Network = Net-worth
The people you meet while building your venture, it will only help you to become a better version of yourself, and with those experiences, and network one has access to a diverse pool of people to provide feedback, capital, opportunities, and so much more.
9. Dealing with failures
Failures are harsh, but the best of teachers. I had to move away from my startup after 3 years of trying to run it, and it took me a long long time to get over the pain. But I learned that “Your startup might have failed, you haven’t.
The learnings, those experiences, those stories, they will grow on you, and as time passes you can only appreciate how much change and impact the startup experience may have brought in you.
10. Believing in yourself
When I finally made peace to let go of my ego, and start afresh, it instilled confidence in me that allowed me to begin from the beginning, and if I have the confidence to post these videos, it is because of the belief I was instilled with while building my startup.
A startup is a great experience to have because it allows you to create something that can perhaps make the world a better place.
#Startup #First1000Days #StonedSanta
