Hi everyone, this is Aladin Ben, CEO and Founder of Gaimz.
While we haven’t officially announced our ties with Founder Institute yet I wanted to share 2 questions that every founder and entrepreneur can rely to.
Question 1:
(Failure) Examine what might cause you to stop pursuing your business or the Customer Problem(s). Imagine a scenario where you would give up. Write a paragraph that describes your life circumstances and business circumstances that would cause you to stop. For example, you may spend all of your savings, you may lose an important personal relationship or you may not get enough customer demand. Then, for each Customer Problem, write a bulleted list of three circumstances that would cause the business to fail that are unique to the Customer Problem.
Entrepreneurs and business owners face many challenges. Striking a balance between leading a successful business and maintaining a personal relationship is an exceptionally challenging brainteaser.
Owning a business is indeed draining. It requires full attention and time at the expense of one’s private and social life. It would be understandable to sacrifice from few months up to very few years one’s precious moments with his family.
However, it cannot be a state of being to lose all ties with one’s surrounding in order to lead a successful business. Being a human being demands and obligates keeping human connections. In fact, how can I respond to customer problems if I lose the basic human understanding of a certain situation?
It is true that my partner should be understanding of how demanding a business can be. Nevertheless, if I cannot manage to balance between the two it will eventually affect me, and my successful business would not be the same way in the long run.
Neither spending all my savings nor having a low customer adoption would stop me from pursuing my dream business. I would find a way to innovate and develop my business which would always be open to new ideas to adapt to new circumstances.
I still do not believe that I would ever give up on my business for the sole reason that I have faith in my ability to manage my business and personal life. However, for the sake of this question, I tried to imagine the only “possible” scenario that would hamper my business.
Question 2:
(Emotional Rollercoaster) Develop healthy tactics to deal with the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship. Being a Founder is a known profession with high stress, heavy workloads and extreme highs or lows, referred to as the emotional rollercoaster, which you may already be experiencing in the program. 1 Write a few bullet points on any healthy tactics that you have used in the past to effectively deal with stress. 2 Find and interview one experienced Founder for a few Minutes, who may be a Mentor, about the emotional rollercoaster. Ask them to tell you about some of the most difficult and the best times they have faced as a Founder, how frequently things go from great to horrible, how they deal with the ups and downs and who they turn to for support. 3 Present to your Working Group for feedback on the most healthy Tactic that you discovered to deal with stress and the emotional rollercoaster. Write a couple of sentences on the Tactic, including a description of how you will implement this Tactic when needed
I have experienced the ups and downs as an entrepreneur multiple times in my career and I have figured out a few healthy tactics to effectively deal with stress:
- Keeping a positive attitude is vital to survive stress. I try to see the good side in everything. Sometimes it might seem quite impossible, but it’s the only way to fight back pessimism and the fear of failure.
- trying to have faith in myself and in my ability to find my way out of any obstacle or complicated situation I face. Self esteem is indeed crucial to stand in the face of stress. It would be backbreaking to doubt one’s self in times of high stress and heavy workloads. Hence, the least I can do is believe that I have what it takes to succeed.
- Believing that failure is inevitable and that it is sometimes the rite of passage. One should not be afraid of failure because it will only be another source of stress. Failure is sometimes a necessary step towards a more successful path. It can allow one to adapt to and adopt new strategies and tactics that can reshape me towards the better.
- Relying on teamwork and sharing responsibility. It would neither be useful or practical to bear the burden of shared tasks alone. Sharing with my co founders my concerns would definitely help to lighten up the heavy load of worrying.
I have had the chance to interview David Helgason the founder and former CEO of Unity Technologies, a licensed game engine that supports 24 platforms, including PlayStation 4 and Linux. David made Unity Technologies in 2004.
David admitted that the first version of their game engine, that he has created with his team “kinda sucked” and with that he discovered that it was hard to make games. However he also admitted that it was actually a very good training to make future games, programming, product design, user experience design. He said that it was a healthy exercise. Meaning that they did not perceived as failure but rather as a training.
He said that beginnings are always hard. He started working with his team in a basement in Copenhagen and the key to success is persistence and believing in himself. He wanted to build a game, so he did.
He wanted to spread his product and get more people to work on it and develop it because it was very expensive to do it by themselves. And they could not get sponsors that easily since they were not an established company.
Patience and dedication are the main keys to success. Working consistently and steadily towards a goal would lead eventually to an impressing success
One of the hardest lows David Helgson had faced in the past is being unable to pay his employees at the beginning of every month. However, they were ambitious and they believed that it would eventually pay off and their business would succeed and spread worldwide. And not being able to pay people made him work harder to achieve that.
Now Unity is valued at $6bn and has over 2100 employees. I’m sure that David isn’t worrying as much anymore.
I hope you enjoyed the read and I can’t wait to share more stories about Founder Institute and Gaimz.
Thank you,
Aladin Ben
