Hi, it’s Melissa, Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar. Welcome (back) to “your founder next door“, a weekly publication on the strategies and stories behind building a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs.
Last week, I was walking home from dinner with a friend. We were talking about founding companies and what it takes to be successful. How do you really know if an idea is going to work?
The conversation reminded him of a story…
Back in university, he had a friend who got really excited about coffee.
He’d worked out what it cost to make a cup and what you could sell it for. How many cups you could sell in a day. What a store would cost. After that, all you had to do was replicate the model and open a lot of stores.
He had the whole business plan in his head, and he wanted my friend to build it with him.
My friend was studying finance at the time. He had mentors who were doing really well, and he was headed for a fancy hedge fund. There was no way he was going to work at coffee shops.
He passed on the idea without a second thought.
His friend went ahead anyway. He opened a shop, then a few more. A few years later, someone came along and bought them.
The buyer kept going and grew it into a coffee chain with over 1,000 locations. You’d recognize the name.
My friend said they were still in their twenties when the deal happened. In his words, when you make a sale like that in your twenties, you never have to work again.
He wasn’t telling me this story out of regret. He’s done well for himself.
He was telling me this to prove a point.
As he put it:
“The only difference between me and him was that he believed in the idea, and I thought coffee was beneath me. That’s it.”
My friend looked at coffee and saw coffee. His friend looked at coffee and saw a massive opportunity.
Is it really as simple as, just believe in the idea? Assuming the idea has real business viability, meaning customers are willing to pay for it… I think so. Jason Fried from 37signals has always said that if some people liked what they built, then they believe others would too. They did not need to own the market to have a great business. He is living proof of his own philosophy.
Nowadays, everyone loves to tell you what’s dead. Outreach is dead. SEO is dead. Email is dead. Ads are dead. Content is dead.
If that’s what you believe, I guarantee you that nothing you do will ever work. Every failure will just be evidence of the story you chose to believe.
If you believe something will be, then the stuff between you and the end goal is just stuff. Process. Things you have to go figure out.
The path between you and where you want to go is never straight. It’s full of obstacles, twists and turns, peaks and valleys.
Life is just a fucking video game. Sometimes you die. Sometimes you pick up extra lives. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. That’s just the way it is, and that’s all there is to it.
The only way to get to the end is to stay in the game long enough to get there.
Hopefully you have fun playing too. That in itself is a win.
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
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