LaunchMob Media

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I just became an Constant Contact partner (not too hard – but I’m learning about their products and services and I’ll be trying it out for my Nona Network.)

If you need to automate your email marketing or event marketing, sign up for the free 60 day trial and I’ll give you a shoutout:

Let me know if you you have any question or need any help.

(Featured Guest Article by Alexander Heyne, Founder, Milk the Pigeon & Modern Health Monk)

Everywhere you turn, in INC magazine, Entrepreneur and Forbes, you read stories of young 20 somethings who sell companies for 20 million dollars, poor artists who become overnight successes, and other anecdotes that make it look like a dream come true to become an entrepreneur.

The reality though, is something very different.

Here are five harsh truths about entrepreneurship.

#1 You don’t deserve anything

For some reason, as a kid who worked hard, I figured I deserved the world. I would look at the people around me and think “I work way harder than these people, I deserve way more.”

There’s a funny thing about feeling you deserve something though. It’s a human invention. Tigers aren’t sitting around the jungle thinking “I’m starving and my pups are dying, I deserve some food, so send me it!”

No, if tigers are hungry and their pups are starving, they hunt and hunt and hunt until they catch food, or starve to death. The options and choices are quite easy. In other words, they do what it takes.

Many rookie entrepreneurs learn this quickly too – it doesn’t matter what you think you deserve, or where you want to be, the only thing that actually matters is that you put your ego aside and do whatever it takes to get the job done.

There are no guarantees.

#2 Success in school does not equal success out of school

Let’s face it. In school we’re bred to become good employees. To follow directions. To fill in the bubbles right. To pick the correct answers and think inside the box.

But once you get out of formal schooling, it’s a whole new world.

Suddenly, initiative and creativity are prized and rewarded – in fact, it’s almost backwards.

Good employees take orders, do things as you tell them (without questioning you), think inside the box, and are very good, predictable cogs in a machine.

As an entrepreneur, almost none of those things are important.

You have to be incredibly creative, hard working, a networker, a people person, a marketer, a salesman – in other words, irreplaceable. You have to wear many hats.

You have to be up for learning as many skills as you need to succeed. It’s not a walk in the park if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing or the mission you’re committed to.

It requires a totally different bucket of skills.

#3 YOUR passion doesn’t matter – but passion DOES matter

Another harsh truth – passion is incredibly important, however, it’s irrelevant to your customer. Your customer just wants something that solves their problem.

When I go into Best Buy, as a typical consumer, I could care less if you like selling me TVs. I just want a great TV for a great price. And no, I’m not a jerk – this is how virtually all customers are when they come into your shop.

‘Help meeeeeeee” they are saying. “Give me a good priceeeeeee” they demand.

So many entrepreneurs start a business because they can finally do work they are passionate about, but this sometimes backfires and becomes their overwhelming obsession.

They get so caught up in finding and living their passion that their business is slowly dying and surrendering because they forgot the only thing that actually mattered: the customer. The market. Demand.

These are all incredibly un-sexy, but I definitely put this in the top 5 reasons why new entrepreneurs fail. An overemphasis on making yourself happy, instead of the overemphasis on making the customer happy and satisfied.

Does that mean passion doesn’t matter? Hell no!

Passion is 10x more important when you work for yourself because you have to keep yourself motivated every single day. You control your income.

In a 9-5 (depending) it doesn’t matter what mood you show up in, as long as you show up, you get paid. Dozens of my corporate friends sit on Facebook half the day in their jobs and get paid.

When you’re on your own, passion is important. Just don’t forget that how much you’re passionate about solving your customers’ problems is king.

#4 Hard work doesn’t matter…. work matters

“You’ve got to want it as bad as you want to breathe.”

“Work until your eyes bleed.”

“You have to sacrifice everything you love in order to put in the hours.”

Have you heard all of these entrepreneurial pieces of advice?

Well I say they’re total bullshit.

They all give the illusion that every form of work is hard, and that only work that is hard is real work.

In my experience, whether or not the work is hard is all a matter of psychology and personal interest – going door to door 100x a day is fun for some really outgoing people who love the challenge. Another person might dread it, and the day drags on and on. Is it objectively hard work? Nope.

Hard work is really subjective. Hard is not the requirement. Work is.

No matter what you do, you have to keep showing up. You have to do the work, regardless of whether or not it’s hard. Some days it will be. Some days it won’t.

Sometimes it just takes a shift of mindset to love the work. Sometimes no matter what you do, the work sucks.

Rather than thinking you have to put yourself through hell as an entrepreneur, just remind yourself of the commandments 1-10 for being an entrepreneur:

Do the work.

#5 Be prepared to fail

Being an entrepreneur means failure. Period.

If you aren’t failing in life and work, you aren’t trying new things.

Rather than viewing failure as a stone wall which you can’t pass, view it as what it is: an experiment.

You try an experiment, you collect data. You collect data, you make new calculated moves. Rinse and repeat.

If there were ever a formula for becoming a successful entrepreneur, it would be this: run as many experiments as possible.

Let’s say to want to figure out a way to market a new invention you’ve made. It’s a robotic nanny that automatically does the dishes for you (I could use one). You know it’s useful, you just don’t know who’d buy it.

So you come up with a list of experiments and a hypothesis:

A. Rich people would like them

B. Busy people would like them

C. Executives would like them

Then you choose a specific experiment to undertake:

A. Marketing to rich people online

B. Marketing to rich people in person at trade shows

C. Marketing to rich people in person by selling B2B

D. Marketing to rich people in person by selling B2C

You do an experiment, and you collect day. Ditch what doesn’t work, go with what does.

Some of your experiments will fail. Some will succeed. But ultimately you are taking the guesswork out and getting important data for the future.

Being an entrepreneur means becoming best friends with failure.

The life of an entrepreneur

The life of an entrepreneur is not easy. But for many people they simply describe it as a “calling” – without which, they wouldn’t be happy. For many people, it’s not a choice, but an obligation. A compulsion. Destiny.

Hopefully these five truths won’t scare you away from finding your work, but will help confirm in your mind that this is indeed what you want to be doing.

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Bio: Alexander runs Milk the Pigeon, a site geared towards lost 20 somethings who want to find freedom through entrepreneurship, and Modern Health Monk, a health site for people who have health problems caused by 21st century life.

I’ll add this to my blog post on Social Currency. What is the value of your personal brand?

Some brands are cooler than others. (So are some people.)

Photo credit: Oliver Bukowsky. Permission not received but we’re cool.

Do you love him or hate him?

Could he be the Most Interesting Man’s son?

Lake Nona Networks announces its February networking event on Wednesday, February 20th at 6pm at the Winehouse in Lake Nona. The meetup group was recently launched by Ken DeGilio, Founder & CEO of LaunchMob Media. Lake Nona Networks is a professional meetup group based in the Lake Nona area of south Orlando to help connect professionals and entrepreneurs. With no agendas, no speakers and no costs, this is Lake Nona’s only after-hours professional networking group.

Two years ago, Lake Nona Networks started as a Linkedin group. The vision for Lake Nona Networks was to develop on online and offline networking group without the cost or hassle of traditional networking groups. “Combining both virtual and the IRL (in real life) dynamic was always the objective,” stated Ken DeGilio.

The first meetup took place in January, 2013 at the Nona Tap Room. Join us at February’s event which will take place at the Winehouse at Lake Nona on February 20th at 6pm. The events will always be the third Wednesday of the month at one of the local pubs in Lake Nona. 

How do you see it?

Good vibes or bad karma?

There are some great lessons to learn when Internet marketing, networking, public relations and social media collide. I wanted to challenge you to think about your brand’s story and how you can use Social PR to help tell your story. I wanted to share a few lessons and provide an example of this using my recent experience with the launch of Lake Nona Networks.

Lake Nona Networks, a new networking group, met for the first time on Wednesday, January 16, 2013 at Nona Tap Room in the Lake Nona community of Orlando, Florida.  This is a new networking meetup for entrepreneurs and professionals in Lake Nona, also known as Medical City, a new neoclassical community with a focus on health and wellness in southeast Orlando.

Here is the social media release: http://www.prlog.org/12053738-lake-nona-networks-announces-its-first-meetup.html 

We can all agree that professional networking is a very important aspect of growing a business and we can also agree that gaining positive publicity is also critical for building our company’s profile in our community. So, to get the meetup promoted I created a Social Media Release to connect with my current online network.

It’s important to create a media release to establish the details in an online format that we can use to easily communicate to our own online networks – our online communities, bloggers and others in our community. We do this while building trust within our own communities. It’s designed to contain your all updated links, photos and videos, if available.

The shift from a traditional press release to a social media release is about taking advantage of our own circles of influence first. While it’s important to gain media attention, it’s not always the primary goal. I remember faxing press releases to media outlets in an effort to “get ink.” Now you can use services like PRWeb and Vocus to manage and distribute your media releases. While it might be critical to get the word out and promote the event through traditional media, it’s also very important to create credibility and build trust in your own circles first. It’s the core of word of mouth marketing and your Social Media Release is now the tool you can use for that. Use these tools to build your online communities and tell your own story!

Social Media Releases are built for the benefit of your online communities.  Here are six tips to make this process more effective:

• Include dynamic links, relevant videos via YouTube and original photographs;

• Have a specific and measurable goal for your release;

• Track and share your results;

• Engage your online friends in your Linkedin groups and on Facebook;

• Tweet it! Distribute your custom content with appropriate hashtags;

• Share it regularly to build your social communities;

• Build an online presence by regularly updating your online pressroom.

Getting Started

I highly recommend PitchEngine as a tool for your social media news release but there are many others. You can tell I created mine using the free service, PRlog, but notice the intrusive ads and boring layout. If you are trying to get your message out there in a professional manner, PitchEngine provides a great service for a minimal monthly cost. This is one I created for one of my clients last year:

http://www.pitchengine.com/playlistlive/second-annual-youtube-event-to-bring-150-online-celebrities-to-central-florida

Why Reports Still Matter…

This goes back to having a marketing goal and strategy for every project you create. If you aren’t tracking and measuring your success, you’ll never be able to improve or grow your marketing efforts. I have some success tips for developing your marketing goals I’ll share in a future blog post.

Here is one of the screenshots from my online reports…

So, what are you waiting for?

Create your own social media release and share it here!  If you have questions about how to get started or how to use any of the tools above, leave a comment below.