How I Bounced Back After a Failed Entrepreneurship Attempt
People love talking about themselves. They love talking about their successes, achievements, how important they think they are, how they never lost faith, and how they manifested success until it actually happened. Very rarely do you see someone talking about their failures, embarrassments, things they wish they never did, stupid mistakes that were completely avoidable, or their own miscalculations.
Entrepreneurship is painted as this career path where you are your own boss, and if you simply work hard and believe then you can accomplish your dreams and be free from the rat race. The idea of entrepreneurship is commercially popular, as well. If you look at almost any book top seller list I’m sure a good amount of them will have some sort of self-help/entrepreneurial connotation. These books and resources aren’t selling you entrepreneurship; they’re selling you the belief you lack in yourself. Belief provided via external stimuli will eventually fade away and require you to seek out the latest and greatest book that every self-proclaimed Instagram success coach swears by. These books all sell the same thing, nothing about them is revolutionary or special.
The reality of entrepreneurship is the mental and financial toll of failure.
What Entrepreneurship Really Is
Entrepreneurship is not a persona, it’s not something you manifest, and it’s not something that is easy by any means. Everyone has seen the statistics along the lines of “1/10 businesses fail within x-amount of months/years.” Does anyone actually process that and realize that it applies to them too? Obviously, people starting businesses believe that they have a chance of being in the 10% that don’t fail. However, this belief is a natural human bias to think that the 90% rule doesn’t apply to you. You are just as likely to fail as anyone else, math is beautifully blind that way. There’s been people with better products and better business plans than you who have still failed at entrepreneurship.
So, what is entrepreneurship? It is actually a super simple concept concisely defined in the Oxford dictionary: “a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.”
If you are an entrepreneur, you operate a business. If you operate a business, you are seeking to acquire market share based upon a competitive advantage derived from your products, processes, resources, or intellectual property. No amount of manifestation or hope will change the fact that if your business can’t compete, then it will simply fail. Being an entrepreneur requires a deep understanding of oneself. Not only what one is capable of doing, but more importantly, what one is capable of not doing. Entrepreneurs solve specific problems in accordance to their competitive advantage. A business that solves every problem is a business that will be filing for bankruptcy soon. A person who knows everything knows nothing.
My Failure and Recovery as an Entrepreneur
I had been coding for 1.5 years before I quit my job as a personal banker to pursue a career as freelancer. I had done a handful of freelance projects before, and was terribly burnt out from my current life. I was still in college full-time while working 40 hours a week as an assistant manager at a bank. My classes were upper level computer science and math courses; I would wake up at 4 am, go to the gym, do homework until 9, go to work, leave work on lunch to go to class, come back to work, and do homework until midnight. Being an assistant manager, my work would often come home with me as well too. I had enough savings to last me a couple of months without work, and I wasn’t paying for school myself, so I felt scared but comfortable taking the risk of pursuing freelance full time.
First Lesson Learned: Life Does Not Care, It Will Kick You While You’re Down
Within a few weeks after quitting my job, I had 2 car emergencies which took a significant portion of my savings. I remember thinking “Well at least this happened in the beginning. Now we move forward.” Shortly after that, a woman who was like my grandmother growing up died. Shortly after that, one of my aunts died as well. These events aren’t directly related to entrepreneurship, but they are a reminder that life can and will continue to kick you while you feel hopeless. The universe does not care about your hopes, dreams, aspirations, or mental health. News flash, you’re not the only one who prioritizes those things. Why should the universe favor you?
A few weeks later, the burden of paying for my education fell onto my lap. This was another direct hit to my savings that I was planning on living off of. Shortly after this, I was no longer able to afford the payments for my tuition plan. I was forced to drop out. Entrepreneurship had cost me my savings and my education before I even landed a client.
Second Lesson Learned: If You Don’t Have a Competitive Advantage, Don’t Compete
My primary offering as a freelancer was iOS applications. I knew this was a booming market as everyone was trying to shift online as the pandemic set in. I was a decent iOS developer, by no means a pro. I saw a market opportunity and I jumped in with no consideration on the competitive advantage I offered and if it was a right market/skill-fit. However, after jumping in and going for a swim, I realized very quickly how outskilled I was. I also had no meaningful iOS portfolio to back me up. In hindsight, I made a great overestimation of my skill on that side of software development and also the feasibility of it. This was in the 3rd and 4th quarters of the business cycle during the COVID recession. Fiscal year spending budgets had been spent, and businesses were prioritizing merely staying afloat. In essence, I was non-competitive in this market. I knew I needed to adapt and adapt quickly.
Third Lesson Learned: If You Try to Do Everything, You Will Do Nothing
I decided to pivot to web development. My strongest languages at the time were C++ and Python. Utilizing Python, I picked up the Django web framework as this is what I had built my previous web applications with for personal projects. This was a strategic pivot as I believed it utilized my existing intellectual property to offer a competitive advantage in the market.
However, just because something makes business sense, doesn’t mean it makes sense. For one, I didn’t like web development. I enjoyed systems, automation, and machine learning. However, because I was financially strapped, I needed the “quick” income I thought web development would offer. The second issue with web development, is that its disgustingly oversaturated. Not only from actual web developers, but from platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, Wordpress, etc that let anyone with the technical knowledge of PowerPoint pretend that they are a web developer. They’re picking fonts and formatting pictures while we’re configuring databases, building the frontend, implementing backend web services, writing application logic, and building APIs.
So, how did I react? I am now strapped for cash, facing deep pressure from my parents to give up and move back home, unable to pay bills, and living day-to-day. In this situation, I naturally went against my own strategy. I joined the dark side and took cheap Shopify jobs. I began offering anything and everything hoping someone would bite, and my work was cheap because of it. People don’t want generalists, they want specialists.
Fourth Lesson: Entrepreneurship Can Mentally Destroy You
After a few months, I finally admitted defeat. I was now broke, had lost 17lbs from not eating, behind on bills, and racking up credit card debt by the day. I looked up “Part-Time Jobs Near Me” and applied to every job on the list so I could try and rebuild a foundation. I felt so ashamed that I had failed, I looked around with envy at everyone who seemed to have everything going perfect in their lives. I continuously questioned myself, what I did wrong, my own self worth, if I was an idiot, if I would ever amount to anything, what the point of life was, if anything even mattered, if I was actually the person I thought I was, and everything in between. I slipped downward and became completely disillusioned with life and society. I went from a promising and enthusiastic freelance software developer to a part-time Nordstrom sales associate.
The Bounce Back
While working at Nordstrom, I still marketed myself to land freelance clients. In addition to this, I continuously practiced my coding skills like a religion. Despite not being in classes, I had more growth as a software engineer during this time than any other point in my life. I had realized what I didn’t know, I knew what I was good at, I knew what I wasn’t good at, but most importantly I knew what I needed to focus on. I looked up my Computer Science degree plan and took free online versions of the classes. I made a self-study schedule where I would practice before work, during lunch, and after work while still being able to get 7–8 hours of sleep.
Something changed within me when I failed. Ironically, failure made me virtually unstoppable. During that time as an entrepreneur, I learned how ugly, cruel, and unforgiving life can be. I didn’t fight this, I thought it was pointless. Instead, I welcomed it. I had gotten the benefit of experiencing this level of failure at a very young age. Many of the people I mentioned earlier have never tasted this type of failure, or they say what they would have done in that situation with their 20/20 hindsight and none of the pressure from the risk being applied to them. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but these people don’t know what they’re talking about. No self-help book can prepare you for what it feels like to actually live in the dark. That is the difference between “knowing” and understanding. Anyone can know anything, only those who have gone through those things can understand them. Most people will come to understand what failure truly is when it is too late and they have far too many dependencies in their life.
Though I had dropped out of school, I never left the class group chats. One day, someone posted about an entry-level IT job that was a part-time position. I applied and got it. I worked two jobs, 7 days a week to rebuild myself before I burnt out after a few months. I knew that the IT job could lead to other opportunities, and I would eventually get promoted to the software development team where I am now. I bounced back from being a college dropout and a failed entrepreneur to being a full-time software developer. After a few months, I had enough to pay off the tuition I owed and reenroll back into school for this upcoming semester. Within a few months, I had completely bounced back and turned my life in the direction I believe it was meant for.
The reality of pursuing entrepreneurship is much different than it’s portrayed. Despite all of this, I can confidently say I will 100% attempt to launch my own startup in the near future, for now I understand what it is to be an entrepreneur. After tasting defeat, I know what to expect and I know how to win.
I would like to end this article with a list of skills that I believe are crucial to success but don’t get mentioned enough:
- Willingness to suffer
- Know your weaknesses, for these define your strengths
- Don’t ever think too highly of yourself, there is someone better and smarter
- Ignore spiritual and self-help trends/fads and focus on strategy and your competitive advantage in the market
- Know when to step up and when to step down
- Pursue mastery
- Intelligence is real world application, anyone can look something up on the internet and pretend to be smart
