Grit and perseverance are the most important things

YCombinator advises for 5% to 7% growth per week.

However, for ContactOut and for most startups, you won’t hit this.

Instead for months or even years you don’t grow.

And then suddenly you will grow by 1000% in 1 month.

It is helpful to set yourself a goal of growing 7% per week. Even if you don’t achieve it.

What’s more important is that when you don’t achieve the 7% growth, you ask yourself:

What can I do differently next week to grow?

What did I learn?

And you aim to learn something new every week.

So every week I’d ask:

What’s the one most important thing that I should work on to grow my business?

What’s the highest impact thing that I can do to grow my business with the least amount of effort and time?

I just keep repeating this LIFT process:

Learnings

Ideas

Fast Tests

every week, and do this for a very long time.

Perseverance is what Steve jobs said is the most important factor in determining startup success.

Most people give up trying off the two to three years and not getting any results.

This is ridiculous.

Let’s say you are trying to be a doctor.

After 3 years at medical school,

you drop out because you haven’t made any money yet.

Everybody will laugh at you.

Of course you haven’t made any money yet.

You haven’t even graduated from medical school!

it takes 10 years to be a doctor,

10 years to be a trained lawyer

10 years to be good in any profession,

yet for entrepreneurship, people think that it’s different.

People think that:

Hey, I can give up up to two, three years.

No, it takes 10 years to be good at anything, including entrepreneurship.

I n fact, everyone that I know personally that has been doing startups full-time for 10 years,

is making on average $1 million in profit a year.

There’s a common saying that nine out of 10 businesses fail.

This is completely wrong,

but let’s assume that it is true.

So, what we’ll do is we’ll try a 1000 business approaches over 10 years, and then we’ll be guaranteed success.

Now, oftentimes it’s faster than this.

e.g: I heard a story about a guy who at a weekend hackathon managed to close $10,000 in revenue because he spent the whole weekend just doing pre-sales.

For ContactOut. It took us six months to make our first dollars of revenue. And it took us about two years to get to 1 million in revenue.

I’ll leave you with some wise words from Steve jobs:

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non successful ones is pure perseverance.

It is so hard.

You pour so much of your life into this thing.

So you got to have an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to write, that you’re passionate about.

Otherwise, you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.

And I think that’s half the battle right there.

— Steve Jobs