Nobody in Jim’s house was happy to hear his decision of leaving his job for opening his own startup. Mr. Cahalan, Jim’s father was extremely upset and worried about Jim. Looking at his young son leaving his high earning job was extremely painful for Jim’s father, especially when half of your lives earning has been spent into your son’s education. But Jim’s mother, like any other mother, had extreme belief on his son that whatever he will be doing in his life, he will do best. But even she was not happy because her dreams for a stable life for Jim which included a beautiful wife and two small children were shattering in front of her eyes, because it’s a common belief in India that no job means no wife and no wife means no children and no children means no happiness in life.
But it is more interesting to know where all these started from. Jim who was working as a software engineer in California got motivated from the movie Social Network which was based on Mark Zuckerberg's journey as an entrepreneur. Well everyone who saw this movie got motivated, especially the youth. But Jim took these motivation extra seriously. Well, he had no knowledge about what a startup is but he had decided now to open his own startup. But he was lacking the confidence to tell this news to his parents and resign from his company. To get motivated he joined a well-known motivation class in his town. Motivators generally have failed in the most instance of their lives but they are great in telling someone how you can achieve anything in his life. He started attending motivation sessions seriously and after attending motivation classes regularly for 2 weeks and reading the whole book of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” written by Robert. T. Kiyosaki, he gained enough motivation in his life. He also found the real culprit behind him not being rich like Bill Gates. Well after reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, anyone would feel that behind his poverty the only man responsible is his/her Dad who didn’t give financial education like the Rich Dad’s character in the book. Although the book has many bitter truths of today’s financial scenario it will easily convince you that your father is a Poor One like in the book. After all this motivation, he handed his resignation to his boss and entered a completely new world of startups.
He came back to his home, told his life-changing decision to his parents and started his life as an entrepreneur. He worked dedicatedly for 13-14 hours daily and soon he developed a food delivery app. But that idea got failed due to stiff competition from the Big International players in this area. After spending 3 years of life, a huge amount of money, and working on 4 unsuccessful ideas he lost his motivation. He had gathered enough motivation for a startup, but he lacked basic knowledge about it. He should have known some key facts about startup, firstly that startups should not have opted just because they are in trend but they should only have opted because we love doing that job otherwise startup can become a burden soon , secondly we should keep billion-dollar startups in mind but we have to understand that before reaching billions we have to pass from hundreds and thousands which might even be less than what we were earning from our jobs, during this period he will never get any time for himself, his family or friends. He chose to open a startup in a hurry and failed to gather the basic knowledge of startups. After losing all these, he decided to rejoin his company again and luckily he got his job back in his company. But before joining his job he tried to find out why he failed. To get the answer of these “why”, he asked a few peoples about peoples who already were successful in that field and he got his answer. Everyone answered him that to make a startup successful two things should be kept in mind. First, for your product, you should have to find an audience and the second point to be kept in mind should be reliability on your product. Your audience should be reliable for your products. This was a lesson that he needed and so before opening a startup, it is strictly advised to meet the peoples who have done it before. But he felt that he has given too many years and have lost all the money he saved and hence he joined his company again. He started his job again, he started living his normal life again and was happy with it. But his passion for opening a startup didn’t die. He attended various entrepreneurship sessions, various meetings where he presented his idea. He worked even after his office time for his own startup and this time he remembered the fact of creating the audience.
After 4 years he resigned again from the company but this time he was a completely different man. He got an awesome fund for his idea from a fortune 500 company, developed an audience for his idea in these years and was assured a job and shares in his own startup. This time he had the support of his family too because neither he was taking his stable life into a danger nor he was using his own savings. But over these years he learned a lot from his startup. He learned the basics of opening a startup. He knew the importance of the audience for his startup. But most importantly, he learned the importance of family and friends who supported him when he needed it most. For many people, Jim wasted his 3 years of life while trying to create his own startup without any help from any major company but for any entrepreneur, it was just a phase of learning during his journey for a successful startup. So, although startups are in trend, more importantly, we need to understand the complexity of startup before working on any such project.
This was the story of Jim whom startup was not only a means of economic backbone but it was the much-needed change in life.
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