Be Relentless

Lessons from Startup Mindsets Season 9

You’ve gotta be relentless as an entrepreneur. You've heard it everywhere possible, maybe on instagram explore page, these short motivational videos that only talk in forms of encouragement and fancy success stories. They never truly paint the full picture. Because entrepreneurship is not always fun, glamorous, or sexy as these clips make it out to be. Yes, raising capital makes for a cool TechCrunch article but a true entrepreneur is not in it for the fame. Perhaps they're chasing this feeling of success which is their dream of the product or service enhancing other people's lives or making the world a better place.

But what happens when you find out that what you have created is not growing at the rate you want/need it to? What happens when cash is low in your bank account? What happens when you cannot close the sales needed to continue operations the way you want? Will you quit and move on? How long will you stay in pursuit?

In 6 months in of making Startup Mindsets an LLC, I have learned there’s no other option but to fight for your dreams for a founder, small business owner, entrepreneur. While tech has been over glamorized and coaxed a lot of people to want to build startups, starting a regular business is also a really great idea for a lot of folks, specialized technology shouldn't be the only form of entrepreneurship to be highlighted nowadays.

I see the mountain as an exciting JOURNEY to climb and we’re pretty close to conquering one tough uphill of landing sponsors, growing downloads and publishing a top tier business book.

I find it quite fitting that a lot of entrepreneurship books also fit the self help category, because, how can starting and scaling a business not be inspiring? We are only really inspired by acts that include courage, following one's heart, overcoming challenges, and doing good for others. To me, interviewing people and hanging out on the podcast does not feel like a job, it’s just fun and we’ve inspired some people that I know, to start stores, quit their shitty jobs and chase pursuits that speak to their inner being.

My advice would be to champion your own individual curiosity and work to solve problems while at the same time doing what brings you joy. If you don't have curiosity, you'll assume the answer without wanting the data.

I recently had the opportunity to interview two successful authors Jeremy Utley and Simon Alexander Ong on Startup Mindsets Podcast. The 2 themes they discuss are finding problems worth solving and doing things that energize you, respectively.

One, it's really important to be either a vitamin or pain killer when it comes to the product or service you create because it will be the way you sell what you've created.

Looking at the big picture, people who start businesses, startups, etc. do so because they found a calling. Finding that calling requires introspection and remaining curious about will this work out, can customers pay me to solve this?

In an interview, I did with John R Green, CEO & Co-founder of Nada, he cites that believing in the products that Nada is building and that they add value to people being what drives him and his team of 20+ to be committed to providing access to digital real estate shares. This appealed to John because he'd previously worked in the mortgage lending space and learned that real estate is a trillion dollar asset class very difficult to break into which led him to start Nada Inc.

If you liked this week's newsletter, like, comment, subscribe to Startup Mindsets wherever you get your podcasts. 🤙 Earl Martin Valencia and I are close to publishing the Startup Mindsets Book and would love to get a copy to you once ready.

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