The most important thing to do is to learn how to improve.
Entrepreneurship can be imidating as a thing to “practice.” I don’t mean reading books, which is nice, but is not the key — I mean practicing through action. I mean hiring people to do things for you!!
Overcoming the early resistance of anxiety/nerves around hiring people is difficult.
On the other hand, once you break through the fear and make your first few hires, you’ll realize that the whole thing is more natural than it appears from outside. Hiring can even be fun. You think about every job in the whole world, and you realize that somebody had to create that job.
Fully half of the activity is creating jobs - for every person employed, there is an equal and opposite employer. You dig? Why not be on the employer side of the equation?
In time you may develop an opposite problem: Over-hiring! Hiring people is addictive like eating potato chips… after the first one, you think, “why not one more?”
After all, each new freelancer or employee that you bring into the group represents new progress that is being made. They represent more hours being spent on your project, without you personally doing that work. It’s amazing!
We quickly shift from the “white belt” mentality (“how do I do this?”) to the black belt: I can do this!
And then we overextend ourselves, burn out, and hit a low point.
LUL // source — reddit
For me it has not been a dramatic burnout or anything. It’s just the small stuff - sending payments a day or two late, or not having work to assign a freelancer at the right time, a sense of lost momentum over time. These don’t ruin a project, but they impede the joy of it.
The team drags to a newly stilted pace. Tasks get done a few days late each as the relationships lose luster and the vision dims.
It’s small stuff, but important small stuff, and it needs to be fixed in order to move onwards to the next great things.
The Value of Small Entrepreneurial Experiments
There is a lot of good to be had in small experiments. To learn as fast as possible, you want to do a “full wave” of experiments in a short period of time.
For all the examples in the next few paragraphs, btw, you can use Steem Gigs to quickly hire people using steem and SBD as the currency.
I <3 Steem Gigs
For example, what if you want to hire people to create graphics for you? You could engineer several fast experiments around this theme, with a total runtime of less than a month. Here are a few ideas that I can brainstorm right now:
(1) Hire one person to create a series of graphics - perhaps one per week - for a month. See how this kind of relationship feels.
(2) Hire several freelancers to “batch” graphics - 3-5 images per person - generating as many as 20 total images for you in a single week.
(3) Subscribe to a month of a paid photo bank to access high quality stock images - experiment with whether or not you even need original images.
Do you see how doing all three of these experiments within one month would lead to tremendous growth and learning as an entrepreneur?
Here are the keys to effective entrepreneurial experiments:
- Fast: Do the whole experiment in less than a month, or less than a week if possible
- Affordable: Design experiments that are affordable without cutting corners.
- Low-Risk: Don’t risk too many of your assets or reputation with any one experiment.
With this approach, you can experiment with almost any entreprenurial idea on Steem.
the power of science as applied to entrepreneurship… source
Examples of Entreprenurial Experiments
Want to try a personal assistant? Hire someone for a week! That’s an easy experiment.
Curious about getting a professional editor for your posts? Hire a Steemian with real pro experience as an editor and ask them to review some of your posts — that’s what I did!
Thinking about outsourcing some of your content to a freelance writer? Why not hire a writer for one article and see how it goes?
Need a website designed and maintained? You could hire a website maker to design a custom UX for Tumblr or Squarespace, giving you a customized online look at a fraction of the full price and without the logistical burden of an indepedent website.
One completely random example of a premium theme on Tumblr. Not bad for $49. source
Want to design and sell merchandise for a profit? How about you hire a designer to make two T-shirt designs, and then an assistant to list those designs on an ecommerce platform, then buy some ads and you’ve got a business with about 15 minutes of work.
Here’s the theme: You reduce your cognitive burden (i.e. how much you think about it) and minimize the risk. If nothing bad can happen and you don’t have to think about it, what can go wrong?
And if money is a problem, you can earn your starting capital on Steem. Save up your rewards until you have enough to execute a few experiments, then do it again.
Anybody who follows that cycle for long enough will stop needing to worry about money. That’s the good thing about entrepreneurship, how it builds itself up. The beginning is the hardest part.
So why not use a simple experiment to get started?