Sharing my own transition from programmer to business owner

Lesson Details:

Video Transition: So you might be wondering how did it go for me the transition between going from a programmer to a business owner slash entrepreneur how did it happen for me for me it was actually difficult when I was even in college I was dabbling with my own business ideas but my own business ideas were not good businesses it's just my own ideas for projects that I thought were gonna be good but ultimately we're not so I was always like on my own time I was always kind of it was bugging me because and maybe you have the same experience like I was like I have this idea don't know if it's good but I really want to make it and like as soon as it like bugs you more then it's fun to be lazy and not do it then you end up doing the idea I just your curiosity has to bug you just enough and then you start working on your idea and see what happens so I didn't get many mentors and I made a lot of mistakes even and what happened in my case was I was always worth doing on the side we can when I started you know that's during the college days and then like when I started working I was literally some days I would program on the my own ideas I would work on that one when I would wake up before work they were on the bus to work even after work out of the weekends and I would just be really driven by my own ideas and wanted to launch them and see how they do.

 and usually they did really bad I mean some parts sometimes they like miss you know what you don't know how to promote them and I would when building it to be honest it's hard enough to build it and all the focus is on building it any idea and it's so hard to do that that when people ask you oh ha you're gonna promote it that sort of for me at least it got kind of you know shoved away and I'll be like I'll take care of that when when it's time I'll tackle that when it's time but then what used to happen almost always is then I didn't know how to promote it when it was time and I never really promoted things well so what was started happening as I started learning one by one I was like hmm well if I I really need to pre-plan the marketing because that killed my previous idea and then I really need to make sure that it's easy to implement the launch because that killed another previous idea and all these hard lessons that I had to learn eventually here is later I was able to start being successful at things I launched now if I'm honest obviously I have so much more experience now I know so much more but if I'm still honest little things that I launched they're not all super successful they're just more likely to be successful and the more you work on them over time the persistence that really makes or breaks that idea because it's very rare from launch to be super successful so that for me it was multiple failures and then after the failures I kind of had a few I guess lukewarm successes things that just made a little bit of money but didn't have like there's no way to really grow them.

So I'm like okay I gotta think ahead of like so it so that something that I build next is not just a lukewarm thing but I could really has potential and so on and so on and so on and just these hard lessons accumulated and over time I started building and inside the hard lessons I'd always you know they'll always be like little lessons of course when you're taking courses like this the whole idea is that it expedites your process lessons your mistakes makes make sure you make fewer mistakes and it makes your process less frustrating less painful but for me to take time and I you know the transition between working which gave me a good salary and then all the self-doubt that happens when I quit the job and I was like okay I'm on my own but the money was situation was stressful and all this so what happened was I started taking like shorter term contracts certain shorter term jobs and it's not like that's the perfect solution because those have their own problems you still have to look for them that takes time sometimes the clients they're like you know smaller clients and they and you waste all the time selling to them so that was a problem I think today that's much easier to solve because there you know the freelancing sites are more established when I was doing this if they weren't and so you know one after another essentially it was a process I guess what I'm really trying to say is that it's a process and all of us always want for that process to go faster and smoother but for each of us it has its own cadence and speed and it's sometimes longer and more painful than we want and my job is to minimize it for you but also you know set your expectations I mean sometimes it does take a while for you to become business savvy enough or to have improved your product enough and so you know figure out how to promote if you'd rather monetize all that stuff so it's you know for the lucky ones it takes under a year maybe under six months their first business does well but I think those are not those are really not the common cases the common case is a longer term struggle mediocre successes bigger successes that you build on top of that that's the real story that maybe you don't hear out there because you only hear the success stories but that's the real story that that that's what is probably the likeliest to expect for you and once you expect it it's not as bad because you knew it's coming.