There are two reasons for doing a startup: a good reason and a real one

“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”

-J. P. Morgan

If you are planning to quit your job and thinking of starting up then I am sure you have done all your home work and you are ready to enter the world of startups. Congratulations!!

I am sure you believe that you have an awesome idea and you are very much sure that you can execute it well and make it work. You are committed to do all the hard work and scarifies that is required to make it big one day.

As you start your startup journey, you have lots of passion and enthusiasm for what you are doing or planning to do. You are busy building your product, designing your website, contacting various business/startup blogs and creating buzz across all social channels. That’s how you should be doing this right?

As you launch your business, you get covered in several news papers, get good coverage on a few startup and business blogs and things have started to move for you. Now it’s time to do the real execution and bring in customers and orders as you have planned.

Now a few months have passed but things are not moving as planned. Orders that you were expecting are not coming through and you are doing meeting after meeting without much results.  Nothing is moving as you expected and you started wondering what to do now. All that enthusiasm and passion will disappear slowly.

Your personal life, professional life, your team mates and everything else is in a mess now.

Suddenly you think while I am doing this, I can do that as well and you start fine-tuning another idea i.e. building second project (product/services) from scratch. So now you are focusing on two different projects/products and hoping one of them will work for sure.

While you are working on that second idea, just pause for a second and think did you really had a Good Reason to startup or you had a real reason? Having a Good Reason is not enough??

This world of Startup is so uncertain; things go wrong most of the time because no one has that ability to make your startup work for you. It’s you, who can find that real reason and make it big. Any idea no matter how attractive it appears to you is worth nothing unless you have the real reason to like and execute that.

Don’t get attracted towards good reasons and good ideas. Find that real reason. Find that ‘why’ you want to do, what you want to do ‘actually’.

How Can I say this?

Because I Have experienced this in my early days 🙂

We were into web development and we built a coupon website for an Indian associate in the USA. One fine day, He asked us; why don’t you launch this portal in India? The idea was when you have the code tested and running in the US, with just a little bit of tweak you can launch it in India. You have office space and everything else that’s required to run this portal and all that you need is a couple of sales guy who will visit stores and bring coupons and offers.

Wow, that’s an awesome Idea and we can manage it too. Because our partner and said he will pay salary and any other operational costs in marketing initially and sever etc was not an issue as we had our own hosting space.

So without even thinking anything else, we started and launched the portal. Hired a sales guy, did some marketing in Kolkata and god good number of coupon on site. But soon we figured out it’s not that easy and you need to spend more on resources to bring coupon etc from other cities and we did that too and finally we had to close it within a year.

It was a great idea at that time and when we closed, tons of other coupon/offer websites were launched in India and some of them eve made it big. Keeping this long story short, we failed because we jumped without any planning and without finding that real reason of doing so.

We were just excited because we thought/assumed we can make it. Now I laugh on myself by the way.

Once you are able to find that real reason of doing what you are planning to do, you can rock the world and build your business.

Why I wrote this post?

Because I am sure there are tons of other people out there who are excited to startup. This post is to ask them politely to validate their reason of starting up.

Go. Find that Real Reason. Win.

Image Source: brazencareerist.com