Just keep going, and drop your ego
April 2014, I’m sitting in the Public Affairs building at UCLA creating post number 98. My co-founders and I are about to graduate college without jobs. We’d committed to giving our startup a shot. But so far, customer acquisition was a complete failure, and that was on me. I’d tried sending outbound emails, some people responded, but the onboarding time was months long and our product only costs $30 a month. Not a good approach. Then I switched to content marketing, and was getting traction, but no conversions. It was promising enough to keep going, but just barely. And 98 posts in, after 11 months, we still had yet to acquire a single paying customer.
But I labored on, creating content on nights and weekends, because I had school during the day and was trying to make sure I graduated. Motivation was tough, despite some numbers going in the right direction on traffic and views, without dollars coming in, we were not going to be able to continue working on the company after graduation.
I published post #98, and nothing happened. Another failure. The feeling of pouring maximum effort into another piece of content only to have it not deliver anything is a unique one. It’s a mix of excitement because this could be the one, but also crushing defeat because the amount of effort required to create real quality content is high. It’s also deeply personal, because my style, my voice, my life experiences, are being embedded in the content. And when it doesn’t deliver, it feels like a direct rejection of me.
It was post 103 that brought in our first paying customers. And that post continued to deliver for a few months, getting us enough traction to keep going. It bought me time to continue creating content, and build momentum.
What I would tell myself in retrospect is you always have to just keep going, and drop your ego. Keep going because building a business is a lifelong endeavor. Sure, there might be moments when you reach certain milestones and celebrate, but really it’s about continuing to evolve yourself as a person, and improve a little bit every day at what you do.
But perhaps more importantly you have to drop your ego. Because when you drop your ego you can analyze your work. You can look at it with clear eyes and improve. If ego is involved you won’t coach yourself to be better. And that will make all of your effort futile. You have to be an outside observer to your own work as an entrepreneur because you’re the only one who can truly admit to yourself when you need to improve.
If you can not give up, and drop your ego so you can self analyze, then success is just a matter of time.
