It was months to the end of NYSC, everything was coming together – I was confident I knew exactly what I wanted to do after my service year. I will start my company, we will scale within a year, make money and hire more staff.
But with no funding to start, no proper job to fund it myself, my road was a bit rough. I was bootstrapping, leveraging on the help of friends and giving up every day. It was hours and hours of reading every other article on Pew Research, Forbes and The Entrepreneur, Harvard business review and Medium. It was watching pitch videos on Shark Tank. It was the feeling of disappointment when you try to sell your idea in a room and nobody gets it.
It is reading about Paddy Adenuga trying to buy off Chevron and relating with the frustration of wanting something and not having it, of reaching out and it feels like you are almost there but there’s nothing.to grab.
Then it became an emotional roller coaster: what if fail? Then I fell into depression, hope spiraled into suicidal thoughts.
I am in a better place now, I still want to give up, I still cry and break down when I think about the start-up, but I’ve learned a few things;
Just because you have an idea does not mean you will execute it or execute it well. Ideas are cute, really, but that’s it, the rest is a tough building process.
I loved what I was doing more than the people I wanted to build for, and the most important part of building anything is people.
If it’s not in its time, it will likely fail.
If you do not seek, you will not find.
It is okay to hold off a dream and come back to it later. Sometimes that is what you need to do to move forward.