Insights

Don’t burry your dreams in worry

For five years, I have been working on this project – JettMe

I have earned some dollars which I graciously accept and am thankful for.

Not much, but it serves as a hope that it holds the potential to earn more in future.

It is very easy to give up on this hope.

It is easy to shut down everything, forget about all the capital that went into building the online project and call it a day.

It has cost me my apartment to get this project up and running. It would cost me a pack of cigarettes to digest the sunk cost.

Life would be easier, I would go to do some job (I have never done a job in life), score a gig here and there and die in harness someday.

It is easy to bury the dream in worry.

Worry about choosing a path with no lights, lamp posts, or guide to walk along with.

But I want to stay on this pathless path.

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We are coming from somewhere and going somewhere.

We can’t change where are coming from, but we can change the course where we are going.

There is no overnight success.

It is gradual. And I am willing to see how long it takes.

Persistence.

I have made many mistakes, that build the project and business for what it is.

Invested resources where I shouldn’t have. Lived in the assumption that you open a shop online and buyers start queuing in front of it.

But I am very sure, that I haven’t made a mistake in opening the shop.

I have made no mistake in investing a chunk of my life to build something that will yield returns in multiples.

It evolved and it will continue to evolve.

There is growth in doing so.

But I had to find a way to keep patience and believe in the process.

A lot changed for me when I stopped calling it a start-up.

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My project was credited with a start-up acceleration program.

I was looking at JettMe from the lens of a startup.

There are stories attributed to this label. Most of them have negative annotations.

Like – 90% of start-ups fail.

It is true because they contest in the arena of startup.

A bullfighter ought to lose the fight in the boxing ring.

The trend of startups confined many businesses in the frame.

It measured success with a yardstick of what it means for a start-up to be successful.

The early adaptors and then the user acquisition rate and how much you are bleeding, who is onboard and how many rounds of funding you have passed through.

I refused to participate in all of it. Intentionally.

I wanted JettMe to evolve in its course. Based on what is required for the business to be successful and not it is required of it to be called a start-up.

I know I am not painting a success story here.

But it doesn’t mean that I should be painting a story of failure.

Business is business, and there is always a new horizon to be found.

The projects that stood the test of the dot com boom were good businesses, not good websites.

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Here are some things that have helped propel the ship so far.

It is a meditative experience.

To build something and to shape it is content.

Someone writes a code and it does things for the audience is a moment of gratification.

People visit from places you haven’t heard of and it shows up in the analytics, which is satisfying.

You see the early income, some cents and then some dollars on the dashboard, that is the moment you know, it is time to yield.

To rip the benefits of your blood and sweat.

The seed that was sowed has grown into a tree and fruits are hanging, to feed the belly and bliss for the senses.

There is a mango tree in our garden, it bears enough fruits each year for our friends and family.

Every time I look at the tree sitting on the balcony, sipping on the cup of chai, I say to myself; “Not planting this tree 20 years ago would have been a mistake.”

Any traditional business has a five-year plan. It needs at least that much for a business to break even.

The trap of instant gratification is dangerous for business. It possesses the risk of killing it even before it is completely born.

Many bits and pieces come together to make the business work. And these pieces are not the same for all the businesses.

Your story is not returned in the books, it is written in real-time as you work on your project.

Wishing a life for Mark Zuckerberg is an unreasonable expectation from life.

Don’t be so hard on yourself. Do your best and forget the rest.

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Your business is nobody’s business.

This reconciliation changed my perspective towards doing business.

I always walked with the pressure of writing that fits into the frame of corporate blogs.

They broke the frame. And I learned this from my shopkeeper.

He never tells features of a rice bag when I go to the shop. He tells personal stories.

I am there for rice, I will buy the rice. But the story connected me to that shop.

Now I go for the story, even though rice is available in many other shops.

I changed my product from being made for an “early adaptor” to a general audience.

A business is not built for early adopters to be successful. Eventually, it has to appeal to the larger audience anyway.

And instead of writing about the product, I started writing personal stories.

I am inclined toward spirituality and creativity. I followed my heart.

It worked. For the first five years, I used to get 3-4 visitors each month. As of I am writing, I get 40-50 visits per month.

It’s not a big hype, but it is incremental.

I am not looking to bump it up with stunts like PR and Viral Marketing.

I did try that. The numbers swell for a while people who are utterly uninterested in the product go back to normal.

I want to build a connection and the only way I found efficient is by telling stories.

Opening up the deepest core and showing your strengths and vulnerability to the people.

The wounds heal together.

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I don’t get to wear the badge of Founder CEO anymore.

One huge burden, off my chest.

I don’t have a definition for what JettMe is. Like they say you should be able to tell people what your business is about in one line.

I can’t. And I have given up on it after many unsuccessful attempts.

I can say, that it is about news, and most of them are written by AI.

I blog on the site, which is a hundred per cent human.

Now what you perceive it to be and what you want to call it, I will leave it up to you. The audience.

None of the artists invented the isms. They are for the sake of historians to categorise the course of the journey of art through human evolution.

I pay no heed to it. Art is personal and it means something to someone for nothing in particular.

It will not cease to exist if the labels are taken away from it.

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I want to see where it goes.

This is not a story of success but a glory of sustenance.

The cliché saying – “You don’t fail, unless you quit” by Abraham Lincoln; I have an itch to see if it is true.

Moreover, a story of success does not have to be written in rules, it is a story.

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I am loving every single moment of building my business now.

I write every day effortlessly.

I am genuinely connecting with people who are genuinely interested in the project an expression of my being.

I extend my hand and they extend hands for a handshake.

No more veils of it being this and that. The goal is no longer to indulge in the jargon and stretch the canvas.

It is what it is. Call it anything or nothing at all.

I get to do what I want to do every single day. That matters a lot.

It might sound selfish, but how could I put myself in the position of giving, if I am in a position of asking?

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