3 lessons I learned from 6 month of entrepreneurship

Yes it officially has been 6 months since I started trying to make money on my own. Here are my 2 cents on what I've learned along the way

For starters, during these 6 months I made two B2C apps (ReplyMore and intentional) and now I'm building my first B2B product/service which is an AI chatbot and agent for e-com stores.

These are the lessons I've learned from the perspective of someone who is just starting out on entrepreneurship and had no money and no experience. I'm writing this as sort of a reflection and maybe help some on if they read this.

1. B2B >> B2C

As I said in my intro, I made 2 B2C apps and now I'm pivoting to a more B2B product. Here is my explanation why : B2C startups are way too hard for first time founders.

As a bootstrapped founder your number one priority is to generate some revenue as soon as possible. Since B2C products are cheaply priced then you need to make a lot of sales to make money. In contrast to that, B2B products are more expensive so you only need one or a few clients to start to make reasonable income.

Why is this difference so important? because to make a lot of sales you need to invest money... A lot of it. So really the only viable way is to get funding through investment.

As someone who like to take things slowly I'm not ready for that right now. So the only viable thing to do is to transition into B2B. Where the method you use to get clients is reaching out to business owners (which is free) and you only need a few clients to make it. Compared to B2C where you need to either do some sort of marketing which is paid.

2. Service oriented >> Product oriented

This is something I've learned from Alex Hormozi and I think it's so true. It's that you should make you startup feel as much as a service as possible, as compared to a product. What's the difference between a service and a product? The main difference is that a service is done-for-you and a product is do-it-yourself. Here's an example to illustrate this, let's say you want to build a website, something like Wordpress or Shopify is a product. While a service is getting a web developer to develop a custom made website for you.

So why is making your startup more of a service is better when starting out as an entrepreneur ? A couple actually..

First and most important you can charge a lot more for a service than for a product. Hiring a web developer is way more expensive than buying a Wordpress subscription. And that's what's most important when starting out as we discussed earlier.

The other benefit is that it takes less time to start out when running a service-like business. So your only goal in the beginning is to get some users. And then figure out the technical side along the way. Compared to making an automatized product where you can only get users after you fully finish developing a product that users can use on their own without you helping out.

Finally this allows you to talk more to users. This will help you know them more and discover their needs and pain points. Especially as you'll be reaching out and talking to them one by one.

3. Get your foot in the door

This is the simplest and most important lesson. I would never had learned any of this if I didn't put my foot in the door and started shipping. It's better to make a bad product than no product because that's the way learning happens.