My 3 biggest mistakes after 5 years as an entrepreneur: How hot dogs teach business growth
So you think you want to be an entrepreneur…
After 5 years of being a full-time entrepreneur, it’s been an absolute roller coaster.
there are 3 things I’ve learned that will help you skip the stress and failure and get to the good part of building a sustainable business
- Choose the right market
- Ignore “follow your passion”
- Stop trying to sell your skills
Entrepreneurship culture is obsessed with “innovation”
People romanticize tech startups receiving X million in funding
ChatGPT comes out and my entire LinkedIn feed is full of “how to use ChatGPT to 100x your revenue in 5 minutes”
For some reason, people are drawn to these nebulous, society-altering ideas
And I was caught deep in it.
I believed I could bootstrap a tech startup, a Colombian coffee company, even a 24/7 virtual fitness system for luxury hotels.
I was caught up in scaleability… making wild calculations of how much revenue I could bring in if I got X number of users.
I dive deep into building it, forecasting every objection, making all the bells and whistles
then, when it came time to bring in revenue, it was nearly impossible to sell.
People weren’t actively searching for it
I was making something people didn’t really need.
This brings me to my first point:
Choose the right market
I heard this everywhere from college marketing classes to binging Alex Hormozi videos,
And I never connected with it. It was too ambiguous of a concept for me to wrap my head around.
I’d look up lists of industries, but never fully understood what they were talking about.
After my struggles as an entrepreneur, I realize they were mainly referring to demand.
Here’s my favorite example:
If you have a hot dog stand outside of a stadium, there will be hundreds if not thousands of starving fans coming to your stand after the game.
It doesn’t matter if you have the “best tasting hot dogs that are guaranteed to cure your hunger pangs” or some wieners you whipped up from the local grocery store,
you’re going to sell out.
As long as you are there and you are ready to serve them well.
My favorite resource for finding businesses that are in demand is Nick Huber’s “businesses I love” post on the Sweaty Startup.
It’s a list of services that are in demand, and have the ability to scale up.
A few of my favorites are:
You may say, “Braden, these businesses are so boring. I’m not passionate about these things”
I used to get caught up in my “passion” too.
Today, young people hear “follow your passion” at nauseam.
Stop. Listening!
Passion isn’t something you find.
It’s not a light at the end of the tunnel.
Passion is an emotion you feel when you are on the right track. It’s what you feel when you do something well, your endorphins fire, and you feel driven to do more.
People experience passion when they talk to others, solve problems, and get outside their comfort zone.
We need to decouple the term passion with career path.
My cousin and my dad are great examples of this.
My cousin sells insurance. Nobody sets out to sell insurance because it’s their “passion”, but he is one of the most upbeat, God-loving people I know.
He is passionate about talking to people and helping them keep their families safe.
My dad became a home builder after years of working in construction.
It’s not what he set out to do, but he became really good at it and felt passionate about building people’s dream homes for them.
Right now, you need to make money. Along the way, you will feel passionate about things, and your wealth will grant you the opportunity to follow those things on the side.
And the best opportunities to make money is in highly demanded markets, against old-school, outdated competitors, which brings me to my third and final point:
Stop trying to sell your skills.
Sell a solution to a common problem, and use those skills to do it well.
Everyone talks about “making a category of one” and the “blue ocean strategy” where you monopolize your skills by being incredibly unique.
But there are 2 problems with this:
- It takes time to create the content and recognition you need
- Manufacturing demand is really really hard
Over the course of 5 years, I developed tons of skills through experience,
My partner and I built custom Webflow websites for multi-million dollar international companies,
live streamed professional boat racing on the Jersey shore beach,
captured content for a top inc5000 entrepreneur and met Gary Vee,
launched a Colombian coffee company in the US that partnered directly with NASA indigenous farmers, went through a full rebrand, set up national 3PL distribution through e-commerce, and broke into 15 Hyvee grocery stores,
& built a landing page SAAS that recently onboarded two international manufacturing companies.
I don’t say this to make you think I’m “crushing it”. While I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything, they aren’t a sustainable business.
I’ve tried to squeeze my unique skill set into the marketplace instead of using it to dominate a market with high demand.
A focused fool will be more successful than a distracted genius. — Alex Hormozi
Just because you can do something others can’t doesn’t mean you have to make a business out of it.
Find a way to use it to your advantage.
For example, I’ve become really good at building web apps in Webflow and researching google ads opportunities.
I found an opportunity to make money renting dumpsters, not sexy, but highly demanded.
I researched the competition in the area, and they run awful ads to even worse landing pages with “call us” as the only call to action.
I then made an easier way for people to rent dumpsters using Webflow, Calendly, and Google Workspace with the intention of contracting these other dumpster companies to fulfill the rentals before I even consider buying my own dumpster.
I’ll dive into testing and launching businesses in another post, but the point is that I used my unique skill set to fulfill something in demand where the competition is old fashioned.
So before you go start your next billion dollar idea
Ask yourself these 3 questions:
- Is it in high demand… right now?
- Am I doing it because it’s my passion?
- Can I use my unique skills to beat the competition?
This will save you tons of time, stress, and failure.
I make these posts to help young entrepreneurs find their way through the dark times where they don’t know which way to turn.
If you feel lost right now drop a comment and tell me your problem.
Good luck out there.
