1..Don’t await Permission

Whenever we think of starting something new or different, we often expect someone to offer us permission to start that and wait until we get it. But waiting isn't going to help! In most realms of business, you can start doing it whenever you want to and, in fact, the act of ‘doing’ is the best way of learning. If you’re providing an honest service then that’s a sufficient amount of qualification you would have needed.

"The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you."

2. Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

Entrepreneurship and business aren't new phenomena. It’s a well-trodden path and in the previous two decades it has grown tremendously. We’ve seen an influx of books, podcasts, websites, articles, interviews and a plethora of other resources from people who have started their own businesses or growth projects. Through such resources these people have shared their experiences and provided  us with the extra guidance which they didn't have. So, make complete use of them.

3. Learn to Code

It might sound a little clichéd now, but knowing the fundamentals of how to code is absolutely valuable. I’ve found it helpful for 2 key reasons:

• Knowing the way to code opens up your mind to potential business ideas – it enables you to understand the realms of possibility.
• Once you have a thought you can turn it into a business by yourself without having to usher in someone who knows the way to code. With my very own business, if I hadn’t known the way to code, we wouldn’t have expanded online. The power to create a website is what allowed it to become a national and then international business.

4. Learn Design Basics

This might sound like a quite simple concept but learning the fundamentals of design and familiarizing yourself with what web design works effectively is extremely helpful. I feel one of the explanations for the growth of our our business was the legitimate and eye-catching look of our website. By developing your eye for design, you'll add production value which has benefits for a huge array of things in life, one of which is business.

5. Do it with Friends

There’s a classic saying in start-ups:

“If you want to go fast, you should go alone; if you want to go far, you should go together”.

I’ve found this to be completely true – it’s far more enjoyable to undertake projects with people instead of trying to go alone on a project. Working with friends makes the entire experience of running a business far more enjoyable and enables you to solve problems collectively and also get a spread of opinions which improves the standard of the product too.

6. Start Small

It’s really easy at the initial stage of a business to get ahead of yourself, overloading features and ultimately becoming overwhelmed very quickly and not getting anything off the ground. It’s much better to concentrate on the fundamentals and your MVP – Minimum Viable Product – which is the smallest version of your product that you can feasibly get in front of individuals . It’s great to initially start off small and then gradually, using user feedback and adding more iterations to the product grow.

7. Do Things that Don’t Scale

This might initially sound counterintuitive. What I mean by this, isn't that you simply should design a product that won’t scale but once you are starting out, undertake actions that won’t scale to make sure customer satisfaction and also build your own customer base. This recommendation originated from an essay by Paul Graham and the main idea is that at the beginning you want to be putting in extra effort to make your customers happy and recruit new customers. The additional physical efforts initially can help things to snowball and lead to rewards further down the road – take AirBnB for instance. The whole team initially went round to every listing in the New York City and offered to take professional photos of each and every apartments and rooms listed on the website.

8. Expect, and Learn From, Failure

The truth is, the possibilities are very small that your start-up will succeed. It’s the hard truth. BUT failures are valuable – you'll learn from your mistakes as well as improve for future projects. If you treat failure as a learning opportunity rather than an outright rejection of your product, it will set you up for success further down the road .

9. Ask Yourself Why

We should regularly ask ourselves why we are really doing what we've decided to do. I read a book in 2016 by Derek Sivers, one among the three books that changed my life, called Anything you want – 40 Lessons for a new kind of Entrepreneur. in this book, he talks about lessons for entrepreneurs that he gained from a corporation called CD Baby that he founded in the late nineties and sold 10 years later. There’s a quote I read in a book that reminds me every time how we can become too transfixed by issues or numbers or anything stressful related to the business and it always brings us back down to earth and into reality – making us focus on what really matters in life. The quote is:

“Never forget why you're really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?”

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