
Brain dump of a wantrepreneur - umedzacharia
https://medium.com/swlh/https-medium-com-anamtahirali-brain-dump-of-a-broke-wantrepreneur-149cb7ca0853#.yddkgzp59
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Terretta
TL;DR: Soft focus melancholia dreams of showing up an ex and an expensive
affiliate marketing "membership" don't magically make you a wildly successful
digital nomad -- turns out you may also need to do billable work. PS. I have
no money, give me a like on Medium.

~~~
dazc
Maybe she could have a look at her own blog; there are loads of tips on being
a successful digital marketer on there?
[http://entrepedia101.com/blog/](http://entrepedia101.com/blog/)

~~~
WA
That blog, unbelievable.

"Here is how blogs make money: Join this multi level snowball marketing
system, like I did, and sell to the next sucker down below.

Btw. I'm broke now."

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narrator
Most businesses fail, quietly. There's a lot of inspirational B.S out there
that makes being successful look easy. I think people vastly underestimate
what it takes to be successful. If there were as much written abut failed
businesses as successful ones, there would not be such a huge wannapreneur
fantasy industry.

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jondubois
Succeeding as an entrepreneur in tech (for the first time) is nearly
impossible. It's like winning the lottery. I don't think that anyone who
succeeds understands (or much less planned for) even a small fraction of all
the factors which led them to this successful outcome.

Of course when you've succeeded once, doing it again is easy - It's the first
time that's hard.

I think the author is right to be afraid of starting a new project. Unless you
know people who can fund you and/or help you secure deals, there is no point
in starting anything - It will fail; it doesn't matter what the idea is, how
smart you are or how hard you work.

Maybe intelligence and work ethics mattered 10 years ago but not today. Today
they are practically worthless - Almost everyone is intelligent and hard
working.

Start a project if you enjoy it, but don't expect it to pay off ever - The
reality is; it won't.

~~~
vinceguidry
I don't think it's akin to winning the lottery, but I do agree with you in
that it's monumentally harder than, say, starting a nail salon. I think the
difficulty goes severely under-appreciated on HN, where you have a whole bunch
of founder-supermen saying that investment is counter-productive.

The tech sector is ten times harder than all other sectors with low barriers
to entry, and bootstrapping is ten times harder than doing it without
investment. Sure, once you've gotten over the experience hump like the
supermen already have, you can start being picky about where your money is
coming from.

But really, the knowledge base on offer here just isn't up to snuff for an
inexperienced person here to learn what he / she needs to learn to avoid
failure. You can fetishize failure all you want, but all that says to me is
that the community is failing to give the people joining it the tools they
need to succeed.

~~~
jaxn
The tech sector is not 10 times harder than all other sectors with low
barriers to entry. Unless by "tech sector" you mean only the part of the
industry focused on trying to create billion dollar household name companies.

A guy who knows how to fix a car is not going to have any easier of a time
launching a successful business than a guy who knows how to build an app or
website. If anything, I would think it would be easier for the tech.

The E Myth is a best-selling book precisely because of how hard it is to go
from being someone who knows how to do something to creating a successful
business that does that thing.

The sad part about this blog post is that the woman who posted it doesn't seem
to be good at the thing she is trying to build a business around. The group
she is an affiliate of seems predatory.

My experience: I own 3 retail stores, and a SaaS product. I have been in both
the brick-and-mortar retail space and the tech space for over a decade.

~~~
vinceguidry
> A guy who knows how to fix a car is not going to have any easier of a time
> launching a successful business than a guy who knows how to build an app or
> website. If anything, I would think it would be easier for the tech.

That's patently ridiculous. We know how to market auto mechanic shops. All the
knowledge is there, you can even go to a library to read about it. Nothing
about the industry has changed so drastically in the last fifty years that you
have to throw out the book.

Small business marketing and economics are so simple and well-understood that
your grandma can start a catering business, and, so long as she follows the
formula, can guarantee she won't starve. She can listen to the banks and the
accountants and the lawyers and be confident she's _getting good advice_.

Ask your grandma to start a website. Nothing about that space is well-
understood to the point where she can have any reasonable amount of confidence
in any course of action she decides to take. Sure there's forums, there's
books, but the landscape changes so often that you have to treat everything as
if it's already outdated.

It never fails to amaze me how often people immersed in technology seems to
catch Stockholm Syndrome every time they think about business in this space.
It's hard. The fact that there's zillions of choices makes it harder and not
easier. The fact that you can do whatever you want makes it harder and not
easier.

~~~
jaxn
Have you ever talked to a mechanic about this? I suspect that you would learn
some things.

Local marketing is not easy. Putting together capital for real estate,
buildout, equipment, etc is not easy.

Hubris is saying that something most people fail at is so easy to execute that
a grandma could do it. Not to mention comments like that are both sexist and
ageist.

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smoyer
"But learn the skill of forgiveness

Not for them but for yourself."

Then in the next sentence she says she'll never forgive "him".

A huge part of being both independent and successful is to constantly be
moving forwards. Forgiveness is in fact emotionally "for you", but you need to
actually let go. I see no indication that this author has actually broken free
of any of the entitlement she lamented early in the piece. But maybe a whiny
piece on failure is good for views? Everyone come and see the train-wreck so I
can get some impressions!

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binarysolo
Reading this just made me sad, as I see this over and over in the tech scene:
the author is too obsessed about success and not enough about solving
fundamental problems or being any good at them. Esp in tech, there's no value
for being half-assed.

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malloreon
The first thing that jumps out at me beyond the florid writing is that she
chose as her affiliate niche 'make money online,' so she's spent the last year
trying to get people like her to buy from her.

Also, 'make money online' is probably the most oversaturated and highest
noise:signal ratio niche there is.

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ImTalking
There wasn't a single logical word in that article; just emotional drivel.

My advise for this young lady is to get off her emotional roller-coaster,
plant herself in a chair, turn off all her devices, and begin to think
rationally.

