Starting your own business generally requires years, if not decades, of work. Even the most dedicated entrepreneurs can get worn down while waiting on their dream to become a reality.
Fortunately, these three entrepreneurs have all experienced the thrill of having their business idea succeed. Here are some of the most important lessons they learned along the way:
Forget About Secrets: Share Your Ideas
Before co-founding the Young Entrepreneur Council, an exclusive community for the most successful young entrepreneurs, Ryan Paugh worked at Brazen Careerist, a website devoted to giving career advice to young professionals. Here’s what he has to say to entrepreneurs who think they must keep their ideas under lock and key.
“The best thing you can do is share your ideas with people. A lot of entrepreneurs avoid this because they are worried that others will steal their ideas. Most people could never execute correctly on a good idea that you had. Ask: Would you buy this? If you get good feedback and truly believe in your heart that your idea has legs, start now.”
Don’t Expect an Overnight Success
It sometimes seems there’s a new 20-something billionaire born every night, especially in tech. It’s understandable, then, that some entrepreneurs feel they have such an innovative idea that big names like Google or Facebook will be clamoring to buy them out in only a few months.
What they don’t see, however, is the years it takes for many entrepreneurs to even work through their ideas enough to build a comprehensive business plan. Rather than rushing it in the hopes of becoming the next millennial millionaire, take the time to really develop your product.
Pinterest CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann learned this lesson when he founded the now wildly successful social sharing network. In its early days, however, Silbermann was running Pinterest out of his apartment, struggling to get the site off the ground. It all worked out in the end, but not before Silbermann learned a valuable lesson. Cut this one out and pin it to your refrigerator (or your board on Pinterest):
“I think the thing that surprised me the most in starting a company, after reading about, ‘Facebook hits Harvard and gets 95 percent penetration in two weeks,’ and ‘Instagram gets to 1,000,000 people,’ is that it can take a really, really long time to build things that are worthwhile.”
Use Negativity as Motivation
As a woman traversing the 1970s New York City real estate industry, Barbara Corcoran (you probably know her from TV’s “Shark Tank”) had to get creative about competing in the male-dominated field. The real estate firm she ran with her then-boyfriend Ray Simone grew significantly in its first few years, earning $560,000 in revenue in 1978. That was the same year Corcoran and Simone broke up and split the company. Rather than cripple her, the separation gave Corcoran the drive she needed to become one of the most successful business owners in her field.
“It’s kind of weird. The best advice was the worst advice,” Corcoran said in a Business Insider piece. “It was from my boyfriend and partner in my first business when he told me I would never succeed without him. I was injured no doubt. But thank God he insulted me because I would not have built a big business without that. It kept me trying everything because I couldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me fail. So the best advice was an insult.”
