One of my biggest regrets around the tech tour is that it isn’t about tech at all. It’s about entrepreneurship.
My personal goal is to meet as many entrepreneurs around North America, I don’t really care whether they consider themselves “tech” people or not.
I tweeted something yesterday that got me thinking about this:
Aspiring entrepreneurs: if there's an idea running around your head, your #1 goal is to figure out how to earn $1K/mo ASAP. Nothing else.
— Paul Singh (@paulsingh) November 2, 2016
At the time, I was listening to a Q&A session with Jonathon Perrelli and thinking about some of the people we’ve met in the last 39 cities we’ve visited this year.
At the early stage, so many entrepreneurs get hung up on things that just don’t matter. (i.e., patents, business plans, logos, NDAs, etc.)
The reality is that the default state of any company is failure and the #1 reason why it will likely fail is because there wasn’t enough money coming in the door.
The good news, however, is that sales fixes everything and that’s entirely in the founding team’s control.
If we could get more people all over the world to be thinking about how to make their first $1,000/month — even if it’s on the side while they hold a full time job — just imagine how much better off they would be.
Some of those side gigs would turn into a nice cash stream for themselves. Some of those could turn into $10,000/month businesses that support the founder full-time. Some could turn into $100,000/month businesses that support entirely new jobs for others.
Entrepreneurs sometimes get lost and it’s the community’s job to make sure they stay focused on the goal: get to $1,000/month in revenue and then worry about everything else.