"80% of success is just showing up."
— Woody Allen
Patience and resilience are core requirements for the entrepreneurial world. Often, it seems like an eternity as you wait for customer behavior to come around or for a market to take off. You do everything you can to keep the company afloat so that you don’t get taken out during the drought At some point, you begin to get up every morning wondering why you are doing this…the low salary, the fire drills and stress, the long hours and the frustration. And then, just when you’ve had enough, the market begins to come around. One customer buys, then another and another. Eventually, you are scaling rapidly and your issues turn to operational issues and efficiency.
This, unfortunately, is more the norm than the exception in the technology world. That said, persistence and "just showing up" each day can, in the end, result in nice win for you. I have often said that if your vision is right, it doesn’t mean your timing is (right product, wrong decade). Since you can’t control the latter, you have to keep your faith that eventually, the boat will turn.
One example of this is the photo service, Shutterfly. I did not even realize that they were still around post their initial battles with Ofoto (now Kodak Easyshare) and Snapfish (owned now by HP). The New York Times article, A Dot-Com Survivor’s Long Road, does a good job laying out this journey. When it went public recently, it re-affirmed my faith in the power of persistence and tenacity. Many a time, a company will start with big hopes, hit a series of challenges and disappear from the public scene only to re-appear several years later with a viable business model and scale.
Now, how you manage the long periods in the desert is more of a personal journey. Just remember that 80% is within your control…