The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship

online all you see is the end result

you see the people that appear to have it all

cars

watches

crazy parties

crazy penthouses

it seems like entrepreneurship is the most perfect life ever

and while most of that lifestyle is faked for social media regardless

the truth is, there’s a very dark side to being an entrepreneur

you’re going to lose a lot more than you win

since 2021: here’s some big L’s I’ve taken

at the age of 20 in January 2022, a large person in the make money online space said he wanted to buy a part of Closify

insisted I fly to his office to strike a deal

so, I do.

I fly there, we come to a handshake deal after I tell him all the details

and he says he won’t make me do a contract on the spot and we can do that on our kickoff call

the contract never came, and they ripped my intellectual property I shared and ghosted me

on top of that, I was only 20, paid for my flight, booked a hotel that I couldn’t even check into because I wasn’t 21 and then I had to book a new plane ticket to go back same day

Big L #1

later in 2022 over the summer a guy that I had respected and trusted told me he could really help blow up Closify by building out our sales systems

charged us $15k upfront, which wasn’t a big deal to us, that was fine

but then, what he built us was no better than what we had

and what he failed to mention, was he used affiliate/partner links to subscribe us to all of these different softwares on a YEAR contract that added up to another $3,000/m

so then we were subscribed to software we didn’t need anymore totalling to $36k over the course of a year + the 15k we paid to have it set up

$50k L and when we threatened to charge back they threatened to make it a big legal battle which I ultimately didn’t want to deal with

Big L #2

Last year, after spending months developing fyne tuner

openai rolls out custom GPT’s basically making it irrelevant so we decide to shut it down

months wasted, not too big of an L because I had a lot of other stuff going on

but on top of those big L’s - there’s ALWAYS something that could blow up at any moment

last night I’m playing xbox with my hometown friends and my CTO calls me

and he tells me he can’t build my power dialer software that I’ve been building for the youtube series because his fulltime job has gotten too insane

so boom, 2 months wasted there and now I need to vet new people and find a new CTO and start development back from 0, further delaying my series and actually being able to launch

it is literally never sunshine and rainbows - it is not some perfect lifestyle you see online

it is some of the highest highs and lowest low’s imaginable

but I wouldn’t trade it for anything and through it all I have so much fun

but know what you’re signing yourself up for

if there’s one thing that’s always helped me - it’s I have a great circle around me

to learn from, to get their opinions, to ask questions

there’s a great community of people waiting for you if you’re up for the task

if you’re the type of person that can take shots to the chin and keep going

we’ll welcome you here

see you inside

alex