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A BIG TheCodeFactory thank you to Mike Ball from Loyalty Match, Jay Lawrence from Infonium and Nikhil Adnani from thnkRF who were our bootstrapping speakers at TheOttawa Network event on Wednesday February 11th. I thouroughly enjoyed the session and it was great, in a misery loves company kind of way, to know that other entrerpeneurs share the same sort of pain and struggle.Here are my key lessons learned in the order in which the speakers presented.

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Mike Ball:

Always remember to celebrate your small victories and reflect on your accomplishments once in a while. This makes dealing with those inevitable challenging times bearable.

Always look for opportunities and you never know where you will find them. Mike and his brother found an unlikely investor for a decent tin cup round totally unexpectedly by asking someone for advice. Turns out they liked the idea nad wanted to invest.

Balance. Remember you have a family.

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Jay Lawrence:

Remember Geoffrey Moore and crossing the chasm? As a start-up you should. Pick your niche and pick your battles. You are small nimble and innovative pick that beach landing where you have a good probability of success and don’t spread yours resources over too broad an area. Focus and win.

Spousal support is crucial to the success of your business. Everyone in one fashion or another talked about dark days of entrepreneurship or those low ebbs. It is at these times that spousal support is essential and usually the catalyst that enables you to keep on truckin. If you are thinking about being an entrepreneur make sure you have full support on the home front.

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Nikhil Adnani

Again the theme of if you are going to be an entrepreneur or a start-up there will be dark days. The key characteristic that keeps all entrepeneurs going is passion. In fact a certain passion that is beyond explanantion something I have refered to before as “Stupid Passion”. All excellent entrerpeneurs posses the “Stupid Passion” gene that keeps you moving forward inspite of set backs, people telling you to get a real job or those inevitable dark days.

All in all a very entreprneurial crowd that lingered and chatted with our speakers until after 10pm.

Ian Graham
 

Filed under: Commercialization, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Ottawa, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
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