Microdosing on Entrepreneurship
I've recently taken to blogging again, and tweeting more and its amazing just how much it feels like a miniaturized version of the early days of a startup.
There's the joy in crafting your vision and a sense of inevitability that what you have to share is going to be quickly adopted by anyone in its path.
Then, almost always, there is the crash that hits you as your launch is met with indifference. You open your eyes to the struggle for attention and that you have to give at least equal thought to distribution as to the product itself.
Suffice it to say that I haven't been getting much engagement on my posts (literally just a couple dozen visitors over the course of 6 blog posts). It's to the point that when I check Google Analytics my own visits significantly skew my metrics.
This feeling isn't new to me. I lived and breathed it everyday in the early days of Cody and Magoosh. Much of entrepreneurship is dealing with indifference and how to keep making progress in the face of it. You end up needing to experiment a lot and get out of your comfort zone. You end up feeling ridiculous quite a bit. But somehow you wake up each day with renewed energy to try again – that's when you know you're on the right path. I know that eventually you can breakthrough, and its largely persistence that will make it so.
With Twitter and blogging, I'm feeling those same things again. But here I am only spending minutes or hours crafting something. With entrepreneurship you are spending months and years, so this whole cycle gets amplified to an extreme.
Still, the next time someone asks me how entrepreneurship feels I know my answer. I'd say spend some time crafting the wittiest tweet you can, post it, and deal with the fact that you have zero engagement.
That right there is a microdose of entrepreneurship.