How's your story doing?

Once in a while, we should switch our attention from the outside world of #eCommerce and dive deep into our minds to ask ourselves:

What is our purpose as entrepreneurs?

I had the pleasure to talk this over with Dennis Yu in our last session of Ecommerce Growth Stories, and it stuck with me.

Let me tell you a story:

I think the mindset of an entrepreneur should be polished every time.

I mean, it's not like you set it and forget it and be hypnotized about the operations.

The story that you tell yourself, the character that you're crafting within is something that you need to optimize over and over again.

So the story that you tell yourself needs to be improved, and you need to look around, get feedback, but stay true to yourself.

My story:

I've been an ex-poor kid from Bucharest, Romania.

At 16, my mom took me to a butcher store and during the summer, as I was playing football all day long.

She said: "You've got to stay here. You've got to learn how it is to work!"

And I got there.

It was that smell of meat, the raw meat everywhere.

There were these people filthy of blood and whatever.

Then they got to smoke a cigarette outside; I ran and got out.

But that memory stuck with me: that's not the story I want to have in my life.

It was shocking.

Then I re-rewrote the story within.

So I said, “I need to sell something. I want to be able to sell!”

And I managed to do that. I wanted to sell insurance because it paid well, and I was penniless.

So I made some money out of it.

Then I said: "No, I got to finish school! I got to finish the university! I got to do this! I got to do that!".

Eventually, I started to say, "I want to build a company! Then, I want to sell the company!"

So I sold that company.

Over and over again, I got from making more money to being happy, and it took me many years to get out of the fear that I would be poor again.

It took me like 15 years.

I had money and I got into this game of making more

and more

and more

and more money just because of the fear not to experience again those moments when I couldn't buy a pretzel in high school.

But the story continues.

You're the main character, and you need to tell yourself in those bad moments when I don't know, things are not going as you wanted them to go, what's the story?

What's the bright future that you're after?

Then you have to convince yourself that you'll make it because that will change your mindset.

That's going to make you attract the right people.

Another crucially important aspect:

once you've told this story to yourself, you need to craft it so that it makes sense for others.

One of the jobs that you can't outsource to anyone as an entrepreneur is your vision that makes sense for your colleagues, for your future employees, for your future clients, for the media, for everyone.

That's something that you need to write, re-write, and articulate.

With this point of view, you can inform everyone. So that's going to help your marketing, product, HR, that's going to help everyone because they will relate to your vision.

It’s like having the blueprint for what kind of company you want to build. And that's something that also needs to be optimized now and then.

For me, it helped dramatically because we were in a crowded space in the CRO space with many competitors popping up.

The tipping point was when Google Optimize got in our space.

I mean, imagine this: you buy from a company that is charging you, and it doesn't have a brand so sounding as Google, or you get a free tool from Google.

Tough choice, right? :)

And guess what?

We needed to get out of that red ocean.

We identified the opportunity: what the customers needed and our place.

That's how we realize that we need to craft the CVO category.

We already have customers and many agencies that are coming to us to teach them about this methodology and to use the tools we crafted.

And it all started by changing the story I told to myself.

I could've thought that we were beaten up, and let's do something else or we tweaked what we were doing and said, "Ok, what's the next level? How can we include what we already do, like conversion rate optimization, and what's the next step?"

The next step was kind of easy when I asked myself the right question:

What's an undeniable value for our customers that we can offer to start with what we know and what we've built so far?