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Each time I read about entrepreneurship, I wonder if perhaps the idea may be oversold. The road to entrepreneurship is a hard one. It is similar to the stories of people winning a lottery. We are only aware of the entrepreneurs who have succeeded in life and made it big. However, the harsh reality is that the number of such entrepreneurs is small. Most entrepreneurship and startups fail! This is the reality – so let’s not sell a lie but instead focus on some of the realities of challenges in entrepreneurship.

I will take motivation from the quote

No more romanticizing about how cool is it to be an entrepreneur

It is easy to get caught up in the romanticism of startups. Most of the articles we see talk about the millions of payouts these founders receive. However, we ought to start with the other side of this statistic as well. Most startups fail because it is a competitive, difficult landscape to succeed. Although the startup environment is fun, and exciting – it does take a lot to survive in this field. The survivors have a different story compared to the ones who don’t. So, it is important to listen to both of them so that we don’t make a decision that we regret.

No more romanticizing about how cool it is to be an entrepreneur. It’s a struggle to save your company’s life – and your own skin – every day of the week

— Spencer Fry, co-founder of CarbonMade

Entrepreneurship is hard work – at least for the first few years, you will spend more time thinking about finding ways to make money. Even if your idea is great, there are challenges such as – developing the idea, raising funds, sales, legal and administrative operations etc. These are only the highlights of the number of things you will need to do as a founder. I agree however that it can be amazing fun working on your own idea. But I would strongly recommend creating a buffer or safety net for yourself before you dive deep into entrepreneurship. I have made that mistake and deeply regret not being careful enough.

It is a struggle to save your company’s life

The initial years of a startup are about keeping it alive. The only way to keep it alive is to have sufficient funds coming in. In the early days, this can mean that your full time job is about fundraising and creating business plans. This will involve creating business plans, developing pitches and networking to meet potential investors. In short, you are selling an idea and a vision for your company. Apart from this, you will still have to come back and work on your idea to show progress. The investors will want to see progress to test how deeply committed you are to your idea and what you’re doing to make it work.

The first few years are about survival and what you do to survive can be a creative game. There are some small ways to create a startup with no money. But most of the startups demand too much hard work just to stay alive and survive.

“No more romanticizing about how cool it is to be an entrepreneur. It’s a struggle to save your company’s life – and your own skin – every day of the week.”

— Spencer Fry, co-founder of CarbonMade