Friday, May 15, 2009

Fear vs. Belief

While I was out running the other night I realized something seismic: belief conquers fear. More specifically, I had conquered my fear of entrepreneurship through belief. While there are many important steps to building a successful start-up business, none is more important than this: the day you realize that your belief in your idea, product, or service is bigger than your fears and anxiety about the business and its future. The day you realize that is a good day.

Leading up to this moment I remember feeling and even saying to some of you that I felt like you could punch me, stab me, shoot me with whatever you had, and everything would bounce off. This feeling was me overcoming fear and believing more and more in what I was doing and the direction we were heading.

In this path I have traveled for nearly 2 years, there have been the highest highs and the lowest lows. And by lows, I mean stress so intense it resulted in temporary loss of vision in one eye. That's scary. And that's it, really - the lowest lows were fueled by fear. The highest highs were fueled by my belief being validated that things were going to be alright.

I am not going to sit here and tell you I am not going to have more lows. I know I will, and I know they could happen any day. But I also know when they do happen, I will pull through and get on top again.

Belief is easier when you start getting external validation. One such validation of our business and overall business model is the fact that we are slowly growing while other much larger competitors are failing. Much larger, better funded, "better lead" companies are fizzling out of gas, and we are just sitting there watching them fall from the sky like bugs hitting the zapper. Why?

It is not because we have a better product or a better portal or a better idea. It is our model. Our approach to getting business done. Talk about validation of belief! Hiding behind patents seems to be worthless. We have patents, but your only true defense in this global market is execution. No start up has funding to protect its patents against a bigger player, and the time wasted in the courts is time wasted focused on your market.

When you have no money things are tough, but when you have no belief, things are impossible.

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