When you have a business idea, everyone tells you to go ahead, it should be easy, because the media and politicians are constantly talking about entrepreneurship, aids, incubators, subsidies…, but nobody tells you what kind of entrepreneur they refer and what the market demands of you to be an entrepreneur…, and that is what this reflection is about.
First thing you do is think about the money you need, and there you find the first wall: for the market of Business Angels, Venture Capital, etc. to let you get closer, the first thing they ask you is “if you have an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), if you are already in the market, if you are already selling, if you have a track record of metrics…“, and you say to yourself “but then, that is already a company, not a startup“. Then, you ask “where do I get the money to set it up?”. Here comes the first concept of an entrepreneur, “you put it on yourself!”. As everyone knows, having ideas is limited to the rich… and if you don’t have it, you can ask your friends and family, due to you are an entrepreneur from a rich family or you develop in a wealthy environment. In other words, the first thing that defines an entrepreneur is to be RICH or to be willing to go bankrupt (mortgage your house or your parents’ house…) to pursue your idea.
But to develop a MVP you need several things, not just money: for example, you need to set up a team of partners with whom to develop the project and, of course, you must be able to locate, convince and bring together that team on your own, because “to undertake you must come with a team”. Well, that is what incubators and other actors are for; they should help you, among other things, to form a team, right? Well, the truth is not: incubators also ask you to come with team, and almost always with an MVP that was almost operational. So, to be an entrepreneur previously you have to meet people with all kinds of knowledge (most of them, scientific and technological), who are willing to join the project.
Even before built the team, especially when it comes to technological projects, you will need to validate your ideas…, and if you do not know all the aspects (which is increasingly common as projects are increasingly complex), how do you do it? The answer of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is simple: “to undertake, you come with everything known”, so here we have the third characteristic of an entrepreneur: you must be a genius who not only knows a sector, but also knows all the technologies that is going to be use in your project.
Finally, to obtain information, to convince the team to join and to convince an investor to invest, you will have to tell everything about your project: the business model, the technologies, the marketing strategies, the alliances. …., absolutely everything! At that moment you ask yourself, “in the initial moment that I am in, anyone is going to be able to plagiarize me and leave me out!” And then, the entrepreneurial ecosystem looks at you and answers…, “it is due to that the idea is worth nothing, what matters is the execution”; but that is where you wanted to get to, to have your startup operating in the market…, but that is not where you are when you start. Of course! The last characteristic of the entrepreneur fails you: you must have temporary ubiquity, to be able to have the project already operating from the moment you are defining the idea.
In addition, as an entrepreneur, the ecosystem requires a series of spectacular personal characteristics, ranging from an unlimited capacity for suffering, permanent availability, place the project far ahead of any other facet of your life and have all the time to dedicate 200% to your project.
In short, to be an entrepreneur you must be a genius with encyclopedic knowledge, meet all kinds of people and have fantastic persuasion skills, be rich, and also be able to have the project running from the moment you have the idea. Easy, right? Are you a superhero entrepreneur, as our ecosystem demands?
If you think these requirements are normal, congratulations! You probably fit perfectly into our business ecosystem. But if you suffer or have suffered any of these barriers, let me know and spread this article.
We are setting up a platform to change this situation. If, like us, you believe that entrepreneurship must be returned to the individual, we are waiting for you.