By Nitesh Chandra:
Entrepreneurship is fast acquiring a coolness factor in India. Newspapers and magazines are full of passionate and largely young people who have made it big by starting up. We have come far as a society in the acceptance of people leaving their jobs to start on their own. Yet, there are cautionary tales and failures galore. The hype and glamour masks the commitment and persistence needed to succeed as an entrepreneur. I have tried to list some groundwork that one should undertake before one decides to go down this route:
– Discover your passion: Passion is crucial. Entrepreneurship will test you at every step; there will be lots of failures and very few successes. Unless you are passionate about what you do, these travails will be disheartening and you will be tempted to give up midway. And how does one understand what they are passionate about? This is usually very obvious, yet a classic test could be asking yourself: ‘‘can I do this for 1000 days and still be passionate about it?’‘
– Unearth an idea: Not all passions can get converted into a viable business. Using your passion as a starting point, try to figure out ideas that may be of value in the real or virtual world. You may check websites like www.springwise.com or www.coolbusinessideas.com and other similar sites as a starting point.
– Team Up: Teams are more successful than individuals. You cannot be good at everything that is needed for the success of a start-up. It is no coincidence that the world’s best-known teams are those formed by school/college friends or colleagues. Facebook, Google, Apple and many of the successful companies bear testament to this fact. So take a good look around you (not necessarily just in college). Choose someone with complementary skills to maximize your chances of success.
– Start Up: This is the most important step. Very few of us actually start working on the idea. Typical excuses are ‘But, will it work?’, ‘But, I still don’t have this, that and this to make it work’, ‘But, I am too busy’ and so on. Essentially, most of us are scared to fail. Once you find yourself going over these thoughts, you are already beaten. Unless you start it up, you will never know whether there is a chance to succeed. Even if you fail, you will learn valuable lessons. In fact, most start-ups fail. All the more reason to get it off ground the soonest and give it your best shot. You can’t succeed unless you at least try to.
India is and will be the hub for a lot of opportunities over the course of this century. The Indian youth could not possibly ask for a better gift. The start-up ecosystem in India has never been so strong. So I believe that it is definitely a good time to give wings to your entrepreneurial dreams.
[box bg=”#fdf78c” color=”#000″]About the author: Mr. Nitesh Chandra, is the Country Manager at EFactor, the world’s largest entrepreneurial community, providing resources that every small business owner needs: funding, knowledge, revenue-gain and cost-saves. Nitesh started his entrepreneurial stint with Inteple, an educational products and services company and then serially founded several startup ventures in Educational Product, Travel, Social Recruitment & Personal Branding as well as Social Networking. For him the excitement of a new startup never wanes as he moves on from project to project lending his expertise and guiding them towards success. At EFactor he joins the team as the Country Manager where he will lend his knowledge to the entrepreneurs on the online networking portal to successfully reach their full potential.[/box]