No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
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No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
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Re: No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
#2Why wouldn't you hire someone to do this for you? Seems like a waste of your time.
Re: No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
#3Email is the easy part. Meetings and phone calls are the worst. I mean - they are if you've never done that before so often.
Re: No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
#4Why wouldn't you hire someone to do this for you? Seems like a waste of your time.
A friend of mine just outsourced this very task. They sent the emails in bulk, and most (if not all) of the company names were wrong. Ouch.
Things like this really kill your chances to have a good start out of the gate. I think it's better to micro-manage your customer contacts.
Re: No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
#5Email is the easy part. Meetings and phone calls are the worst. I mean - they are if you've never done that before so often.
Yup, if you're a programmer (like most of us), transitioning into that role is very tough. You have to be very extroverted and it can be unsettling sometimes.
I'd love to see some interviews with successful programmers turned CEO's/managers (but in smaller companies, not Bill Gates) to see how they managed it.
Also, shouldn't you call people instead? Calls are generally more personal and harder to ignore than a random email from a stranger.
Re: No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
#6Different strokes for different folks, but I could count on one hand the number of business emails I've sent in the last four years that went to someone other than a customer, supplier, or "people I know well enough to invite out for coffee."
This might be a weakness in my skillset, but I tend to think that outbound marketing is a very time-intensive proposition, and as a sole businessman time is something I can never really have enough of. I don't want to do anything that has to get over a spam filter, a low-conversion inbox scan, and then a low-conversion salespitch for it to positively affect my business. (And, it goes without saying, spam is right out.)
I don't know what your personal threshold is for writing non-spammy email, but I personally can't put my hands on a keyboard and not type a hundred words. Even at ten emails a day, that is a thousand words. That could be an article, an interview, a blog post (that would be criticized for overlength), etc, etc. All things that I get to keep, that stay available on the public Internet, and that aren't strongly dependent on the reception of individual third parties.
I'd much rather write the thousand words and pull some folks to me. After that, perhaps we could do email and/or coffee.
Re: No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
#7Why wouldn't you hire someone to do this for you? Seems like a waste of your time.
"Getting out of the building" is not a task you want to outsource. Speaking to initial potential customers is critical to the start up and must involve the founders. Once you establish product/market fit outsiders can come into play.
Re: No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
#8My comment on the blog: I disagree that emailing strangers makes you a entrepreneur. But, I do agree with the spirit of what he's saying that to be a successful entrepreneur you do have to step out of your comfort zone and contact those that you don't know.
Re: No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
#9Email is the easy part. Meetings and phone calls are the worst. I mean - they are if you've never done that before so often.
Yup, if you're a programmer (like most of us), transitioning into that role is very tough. You have to be very extroverted and it can be unsettling sometimes. I'd love to see some interviews with successful programmers turned CEO's/managers (but in smaller companies, not Bill Gates) to see how they managed it. Also, shouldn't you call people instead? Calls are generally more personal and harder to ignore than a rando…
I think you can find some interviews like that on Mixergy.
Re: No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means
#10it’s just contacting people you don’t know to ask/beg for favors
My take on "what being an entrepreneur really means" is 179 degrees from yours:
I can't wait to contact people I don't know to share what I'm doing and how it can improve their lives.
If you don't feel the same way, maybe you shouldn't be an entrepreneur.
I regularly go to Tech Breakfasts, Chamber of Commerce meetings, industry dinners, dev groups, and network over coffee or beer just for the chance to talk about what I'm doing. I love doing this almost as much as writing the code itself. It gets me off my butt and away from my terminal and also gets valuable feedback from others.
Coding in a vacuum is like trying to push cooked spaghetti through a straw. Getting away from my text editor and talking to others, regardless of method, completes the loop and improves the whole process.
And anyway, I'm not writing it for myself. It's for them. They really need to know.