The Journey of the Entrepreneur

In our weekly bulletin, we try to compile useful information on entrepreneurship, start-up world, e-commerce, e-export, digital marketing and productivity and inspire you.

Hello beautiful people burning in the fire of entrepreneurship.

Welcome to the second issue of my bulletin, where I will try to share weekly compilations focused on entrepreneurship.

Please follow up.

You have read, listened to, thought about and pondered dozens of different words, articles, motivational speeches or detailed articles within the concepts of enterprise, entrepreneurship, start-up ecosystem etc.

But you haven't started yet or you have started but haven't made progress.

So, what steps does this journey start and progress with?

Getting Started

Every enterprise starts with choosing an idea.

This bulletin is also a new enterprise for me. Let's not forget that entrepreneurship is not about generating ideas or finding ideas that have never been done before.

Entrepreneurship is about bringing an idea to life.

I hope this year will be a year when you also bring an idea to life, not a dreamer but a doer. You need to choose to start. Let's evaluate this choice in the next step. But after you make your choice, the first thing you need to do is to start, to take that first step.

This is really a venture that requires courage, and is as unsettling as the moment you entered the sea before learning to swim. I wonder how deep the water is, will I sink, will someone save me, what if something bites me in the water, what if I can't swim and I'm embarrassed, what if my swimsuit comes off, and many negative thoughts like these burn you up inside.

Because your brain doesn't want to go beyond what it is used to. Because it likes to do many daily things without thinking about them, turning them into habits. Just like after learning to swim, you jump into the water without thinking, swim and enjoy that moment.

Therefore, it is normal to be afraid, for all of us.

Because even though starting is taking the first step, you know deep down that the next step is to walk, move forward, and continue.

This is a big decision that means you have made the decision to invest your time, effort and mind in this business. Of course, every decision is a renunciation. This requires moving away from what you are currently doing.

Maybe quitting your job, maybe giving up the time you spend playing games, spending less free time and working more, it forces us to get out of our comfort zone and to show the courage to move away from laziness.

For example, after deciding to write this newsletter, those inner thoughts that distracted me, writing every week, setting aside time, getting up on Sundays instead of sleeping and rolling, thinking, writing, taking notes during the week to use in the next issue, enriching the content, the additional workload, are things that challenge an award-winning lazy person like me.

On the other hand, those thoughts of failure that distract us, such as whether it will be read, what if no one reads it.

The best way to cope with this is this;

Unless you start, you have no chance of being successful or unsuccessful.

First of all, you need to accept this.

In other words, I can accept failure, but never not trying, as the saying goes.

Realizing that if you fail, you will gain the experience of having tried. The thought that I told myself in this newsletter, if no one reads it, I will have gained the habit of writing, was like a remedy for my anxiety.

Of course, our hearts are in favor of your initiatives being successful. Although everything depends on factors such as luck, effort, network, continuity, being at the right time, with the right people, and in the right place, the possibility of success comes with the possibility of failure.

Therefore, your plans should be based on success and your effort should be on the axis of how to succeed, but you should always carry other possibilities in your pocket.

What is needed to start;

The concept of lean enterprise, or “lean startup”, will help you a lot on this journey. In other words, starting with what you have, with the most basic functions.

This is both starting with the minimum expenditure by reducing your start-up costs, and using your capital for sales rather than for starting, and trying to build the walls of your business from the money you earn.

If your job is an office job, first of all, you do not need to spend all your money on the office, furniture, decoration, etc. The reason why 40% of the businesses established in our country close in the first year and only 20% reach the 5th year is that our entrepreneurs spend all their money and resources on offices, machines and fixed assets at the beginning, and do not allocate operating costs to market, sell and continue the business, and therefore cannot survive the first 6 months-1 year until the business turns itself around.

There may be a place for you in the market, but no one will knock on the door of your office, shop or workshop just because you have established the business.

You will need time, work and continuity to establish a place there, gain customers and gain regular customers.

Every business aims for profit.

In order for the enterprise to make money, which is the purpose of its establishment, it needs to make sales in order to survive. Therefore, your priority should be sales, and your initial expenses should be sales-oriented. Offices, fixed assets, furniture, vehicles that will not make direct sales

Finding a Business Idea

On average, our conversations are full of ideas like you will do this job like this, you will open a place like this, you will change this product like this or you will offer this service here etc. But choosing a business idea can be a difficult choice.

In order to bring together the business ideas that you can and can do for the business idea selection, you should write them down.

You can start with the ones in your mind or the ones you have said you should do before. You can add new ideas in the field you know. This can be finding market problems and developing ideas that will solve them.

For this, the easiest method is to look at the customer comments of your current competitors, find their shortcomings and start with a product that only has one feature that addresses that shortcoming. If it is an application, you can find it from the app store/play store comments, if it is a service, from the company comments, if it is a place, from the Google Maps comments by looking at those who left 1 star or negative comments.

For ideas,

• looking at customer problems,
• looking at the shortcomings of your competitors,
• adapting new applications abroad to the domestic market,

are the 3 most basic methods to apply.

Now you have a few business ideas. Which one should you choose and start working on?

A business idea selection canvas is very useful for this. What is this business idea canvas?

For this, we open columns on a piece of paper or an excel file. We start by writing your top business ideas in each column. Under each business idea, we write;

• your expectations from this business idea,
• the requirements for starting the business,
• the cost of establishing the business,
• the skills you need to have or acquire to make the business successful,
• your network capacity where you can get support for this business,
• where you want to take this business in 5 years and how you will feel then,

separately for each business idea. It would be more efficient to write each business idea on separate days.

Then, according to what you have written, we eliminate the business idea with the lowest score. By deducting one business idea every day, the last remaining business idea is now our only goal.

All that remains is to start this business idea using the resources we have, but to start it immediately.

Next Step: Growth

After going through the steps of finding, choosing, establishing and starting the business idea, it is necessary to grow.

Optimizing the product and service before growth, starting the first sales, in other words, getting your company running is perhaps the most difficult stage of the job.

At this stage, the entrepreneur needs to do everything and wear every hat to achieve maximum efficiency with minimum cost. You will have the difficulty of learning many jobs by doing yourself such as production, purchasing, marketing, sales, accounting, payment tracking, recruitment, collaborations, financing, etc. When you work in a company, they hire you for a position and you do the relevant job there.

For example, you do welding in production, or you do invoice tracking in the accounting department, or you are responsible for collaborations in the export department. You do these jobs using the opportunities given to you in the areas given to you. Your working hours are certain.

But it is up to the entrepreneur to do everything that the job requires and to create the necessary opportunities for it. The time he needs while doing everything is far beyond the concept of working hours.

Therefore, do not think of starting a business with the idea of working more. Being an entrepreneur forces you to be on the job 24/7, to sleep and wake up with your job.

Instead of establishing an application, purchasing an app that is established in the same field but has not yet grown; instead of establishing a workshop to produce a product, purchasing a workshop that produces similar products along with its business; instead of starting a travel blog, purchasing a vacation blog that already has content and focusing on growth can provide rapid growth by skipping those first steps and time.

Today, we talked a lot about the basics of entrepreneurship.

So, what about you; where are you in the entrepreneurship adventure?

Don't forget to write in the comments.