Entrepreneur's emotional cost

It has been almost 10 years since I returned from UK and naively thought of starting a business to make shit loads of money when I was 22 years old. Now I'm 32 and looking back the whole 10 years things have definitely improved from the day when I had no access to Rs. 20 for eating lunch.

When I decided to start a business I had Rs. 24 Lakhs as education loan with 15% APR, I was naive, fearless, emotionally strong, and definitely over-confident that I'll pull this off.

Exactly 10 months later, the first business it toppled. Started consultation work for the University I studied in UK, and that helped me to meet my ends pay off the bills as well as the education loan EMI.

Analytics interested me a lot, started again in the side. In mid-2013, when I landed another consulting project and had a surplus money beyond my expense I hired a person to start digital marketing company who became my co-founder.

Landed our first client in 2014 January, who's still our client and slowly expanded our client base. With digital marketing as a base and analytics interest we started focusing on our product Customerlabs.

It had a lot of twists and turns, went in all directions but we always had a vision that is help small-medium businesses to leverage technology and help them compete with large enterprises.

This went deep into our mind and heart because the world is not a level playing field for SMBs and large enterprises.

In my case, my father is a farmer and the earning was USD ~1500 per year when the yield was good. I did my primary schooling under a tamarind tree, education was a privilege for me, learning in English language is a privilege for me. I had hard time understanding English when I was in school and I was able to read English very well, however, understanding it, was not possible.

So whenever I appear in exams, it was quite hard for me to understand questions to answer. If I understand the question, I always knew the answers.

I learnt about IITs when I was in my third year of college, access to information is limited. aspirations were limited, resources were limited and help was limited.

When we knew that there's an opportunity available someone who had privileged access can achieve that with less efforts while others need to kick-start it with a lot of effort.

My own story motivated us to focus on the SMBs problem, and we understand their resources, time and money constraints. We wanted to help them by building software that reduces the gap between large and SMBs.

When you focus on the SMBs it takes a larger effort to position yourself and the adoption is usually longer. To make them adopt the technology you've got to have strong roadmap for training, this is typically stopping us from making money.

The journey is not easy, access to capital, market, hiring resources, paying salaries all taking a toll on the mind. The feeling of loneliness, peer pressure to raise money, moving into posh office, growing the company triple, triple, double, double push you harder into a danger zone from which some of us will never recover.

Over the course of last 6 months, the pressure has mounted and from a unknown source(read as no external pressure). We are breaking even, definitely growing decently but the social pressure of comparing ourselves knocks me down hardly.

Last three months, I've been hard on my team who has been with me for more than 3 years. The anxiety is kickin, and there's a fear of failure but we are growing in all known metrics.

The stigma, pressure and unnecessary fear making me emotionally week. Unfortunately I can't be seen as week because I'm the boss it de-motivates the team, says a few. Everyone wants the leader to be a superhuman, stay strong all the time and knows answers to all the problems. Though things are looking good the insecurity, fear of failure and stigma causes physical and mental stress.

Indians are obsessed with rankings, marks and similarly the Indian startup ecosystem is obsessed with ARR, money raised, the unicorn status and the fancy unicorn role models.

Entrepreneurship is not easy, if you have taken a leap to try it out be proud of yourself. Let's not compare each other journey, I understand the emotional stress and if you'd like to talk, spend time away from your office please reach out to me. I promise I don't talk about your ARR, the number of customers, sales tactics, and the marketing strategy.

a) You are not alone,

b) It's okay, you are not a superhuman.

c) Be always proud of yourself.

As much as you do, I equally need help to get out of this. Perhaps we can help each other and others who are going through this.