Entrepreneurship is Boring and Difficult

Succeeding in entrepreneurship is less about new ideas, strategies, methods and hacks. It is more about doing the boring & difficult tasks consistently for a long period of time.

The secrets of business are pretty simple:

• Make something people want
• Create a good product
• Communicate to the right customers with the right message
• Convert
• Serve and support
• Reward customers

There is no other secret. There is no need of a 2-year MBA. If you do the above right, everything else is for hire.
The hardest thing in business is empathy. If you can have empathy for your customers, and the pain they are going through – and if you can create the right solution for it, the product will sell itself.

The skill is so simple, but yet it is so rare. It is so rare that there are very few successful entrepreneurs in the world. And most of the people are ready to work for the people who can actually crack this.

And even then a lot of entrepreneurs fail, because they couldn’t get the product-market fit right.

Even investors with all their intelligence and might don’t want to run the companies themselves – but invest in companies that are growing fast.

1. Make something people want: Getting married to a grand idea in your head and working for years to perfect it is easy and sexy. Going out and asking customers about their pain points is boring, uncomfortable and unsexy.

2. Create a good product: Creating a hype and selling a product is exciting. Money comes in for the short term. Having the patience to create really good products that actually helps the customers is difficult and boring.

3. Communicate to the right customers with the right message: Setting up good looking ads on Facebook and Google is exciting and sexy. Getting 1000s of clicks is nice to see. Going through 100s of customer responses and spending hours on reading their replies … and writing really long copy that talks directly to the customer’s soul is difficult and boring.

4. Convert: It is easy to setup a sales team and a sales page and pour money into ads. It is difficult, boring and sometimes impossible for people to just wait 30 days and add value to prospects with content. People want money today, not tomorrow. They kill the golden goose.

5. Serve and support: It is easy to keep pouring money into marketing and keep pushing for sales. It is difficult and not urgent to invest in customer support and create a great experience for customers (I have made this mistake myself).

6. Reward customers: It is easy to forget about the customers who already paid you and put focus on acquiring new customers. It is difficult and boring to reward existing customers, because the ROI is not direct and immediate.

Succeeding in business is about empathy, love for creation, love for communication, patience, discipline, ethics, moral value and gratitude than anything else.

You don’t need an MBA degree, work experience, expert consultants, high tech tools, investors or anything fancy to succeed in business. Don’t chase that. They do not help if you don’t get the basics that we discussed above right in the first place. You will never get the basics later once you grow. You cannot strengthen the foundation after building the building.

This post is all you need.

Now stop browsing, and stop looking for more content like this.

If you don’t have a successful business yet, it’s not because you don’t know enough. It’s because you haven’t worked enough.

Everyone is looking for the secret to success. It’s right under your nose. It’s called W.O.R.K.

Work on yourself. Work on your habits. Work on understanding your customers. Work on your products. Work on communication. Work on serving customers.

If you do all this, results will come. 100% it will come. Because for every action, there is an opposite reaction.

Once you got the results, you can improve the results with learning. And then optimize it.

You can never optimize before getting started. You don’t need all the lights to be green until you start the car.

You will figure out along the way, but get started already.