Entrepreneurship isn’t just about risk and reward, opportunity windows, or sexy new brands. It’s about change. Sometimes that change is dramatic, sometimes it’s subtle. Entrepreneurs can change entire markets, industries, and institutions. By definition, to be an entrepreneur is to create something new instead of perpetuating the old. It means to push against the status quo. Ideas Are Crap, Implementation Matters. When I initially started working on my first venture I used to spend a lot of time on brainstorming ideas. Sadly, they used to end up on paper or lost in the chat box conversations. Just get into the action and start building. Don’t worry, you can always learn on the go!

Every one's strongest source of motivation should be the vision for the future. The change one would make in the world is what should get one out of bed. Being one of the Co-Founders of HyperXchange, I and my Co-Founders are building a collective of investors and entrepreneurs that will help to create a sustainable and inclusive economy building a standardized and first pre-owned brand.

Having a clear purpose is vital in getting through the long hours, intimidating investors, challenging clients, setbacks, and disappointments. I also receive energy from the people I work with. There’s nothing like being surrounded by people who believe in your vision to help get you through the scary, frustrating, tiresome stages of launching a new venture.Life as a young entrepreneur seems exciting, but it brings challenges that you have to deal with on your pathway to success.

When I was starting, I made lot of mistakes and wasted lot of time in doing things which were counter productive or didn’t align with building and growing a business. My learnings are as follows:

Ideally, you want to start from a pain point and see what solution you can build. It will be good if that is a problem faced by many as this will determine your market size. Also almost always people start with something else and end up building something else after few failures and iterations. Spend all your time and resources on building and selling. One of the founders has to understand technology. Way too many startups fail because of bad technical decision specially choosing wrong technology stack. It took me over two years to build HyperXchange to over a million dollar valuation. At first, there wasn’t really much to show, there was no product or team and I was extremely hyper. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to raise and the number kept on fluctuating from $200k to $1M on daily basis.

Needless to say, I couldn’t raise anything but still I did learnt some very valuable lessons by getting rejected from every VC and angel investors of India. DO NOT chase them, let them chase you. There are plenty of associates hanging out on LinkedIn and who reads EconomicTimes and NextBigWhat so if you are doing good, they will contact you. Ideally one of the core founding team member should manage finances as money is oxygen for startups. It is also important if you want to raise funding in future too. Every startup founder is a dreamer and wants to make it big but it is stupid to do it at the cost of relationship, health, life and fun. I think its OK to work 14 hours a day, living on Maggi and your startup being the center of your life for some time but you can’t do it for years. In fact, this means you are making wrong decisions running your startup too as this is why you are not able to find the right work-life balance. Take care of your health and relationships since you can’t buy it with money, success and fame. Also, keep learning and having fun in life and have it today, don’t wait for tomorrow. Failure in the quest of an entrepreneurial journey isn't uncommon, most entrepreneurs do not make it till the Zenith, it is okay to fail multiple times, learn and begin again. You might never become a Jobs or a Zuckerberg, you might never be the front page news, you might never earn a billion dollars or own a private jet. Your entrepreneurial journey is a mission. You might end up big at the end or you might not, always live by your principles, that would be enough to satisfy you at the end of each day in your journey.

As an entrepreneur your biggest responsibility is ‘To Sell’ it might sometimes become dirty, do not stop selling, do not be ashamed to pitch people, friends, family every time you meet someone around. Do not take NO for an answer.