'Empty days' while running a startup
Editor's Note: With a fresh wave of entrepreneurship coming in, India is seeing many young entrepreneurs starting up. As a first time entrepreneur, there are some problems which are very hard to understand if you're not experiencing them first hand. And it becomes very important to find support for an entrepreneur which usually comes from other founders and basically the startup ecosystem. Here, Prerna Mukharya takes us through her journey and tells us about her 'empty days'...
I run a research startup ‘Outline India’ and I’ve been waiting for someone to write on how I feel on most days. My lows are mostly not the fancy lows as described in newspaper articles and startup blogs, but O’so very basic.
I haven’t slept well in 3 nights now. I’m waiting for my client to pay up the last tranche of payment, they are two weeks late. By extension, I need to pay my employees who are now wondering if they will receive their payment. I could dig into my humble personal savings, and pay up, but I’m counting sheep and hoping for the payment to show up.
Not being able to go out for fancy dinners, and lunches and not being able to afford Zara are stereotypes albeit true ones.
But my problems are much mundane than that, I find myself making projections for how long my savings are good enough to sustain me while having enough to pay my interns or to take my potential client out for a cup of coffee. I do not own an office space and try and get out of the house to work, (yes, that’s a must to keep motivation levels up), well whoever said coffee was cheap!
I never buy a large, it’s always a regular Americano. The coffee shop folk now know me since I frequent them, and we exchange casual pleasantries every time. I seat myself on a corner sunny table for two, plop my bag on one and work away for a few hours everyday form there. In the beginning, they would come ask me after a two hour period with their polite, ’Madam, anything else for you?’ and Id politely nod and turn them down. In due course, I think they figured I was a struggling writer of some sort.
They let me be now.
Again, the idea of a lot of work is always welcome in a startup. And when I say work, it can mean a lot of things. It can mean preparing for meetings to get work. Mind you, every project needs x hours of work before a preliminary discussion. If you are startup, you make that x+ 5 and if you are a struggling startup, you try to make that (x+5)x3 for projects of each kind to hedge your bets. I never knew I would actually care about the probability lessons I learnt in school!
But these days don’t bother me, even though I know that on a good day I stand a 50% chance of getting a project. What does bother me are the ‘empty days’.
If you’ve been a student who stayed at home for a few months to prepare for some exam, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The empty days, when you have little else to do, when you spend most of your times reaching out to potential clients, without an ounce of an expectation of hearing back. You wake up, you do your thing, and its evening, you’ve doodled and dabbled in work for a few hours but you have nothing tangible to show for it. When you meet your friends on the weekend and they re exchanging stories on how ‘Oh this was a tough week, my boss is in town’, ‘Oh I’ve been sleeping 5 hours every night for a week now’, ‘ Oh I wont be able to make it for dinner at 8 pm, you guys start without me’. And I’m thinking, I made time for all those things; I’m clearly not a busy person.
What’s worse, are those days when your team members bail on you without prior intimation or your interns ask you what to do next and you re not sure. I have an intrinsic belief that you need to keep your team motivated, but you cant make people stay unless they want to. You can’t start working with a startup for money; you work for it because you believe in the idea. For instance, I believe that data is the foundation of research and that India needs data. It does not have to be an altruistic motive; it just has to be a simple, believable chain of thought.
There are days when I go to bed absolutely exhausted, and then other days when I’m emotionally exhausted and still others when I’m so exhausted thinking of what’s coming next that I cant sleep. I’m too frazzled to be able to read a book, so my mind races while my body stays put.
What I do when I have my share of don’t-know-what-to-do-next days? Well, I look for inspiration. I look for other startups to collaborate with, or I pick up my phone and call up friends who run startups. I head to the gym. I watch a movie I’ve seen twice before so I know what to expect. I send an email to a friend I’ve not been in touch with for a few months. I cook. I go do that meeting I’ve been putting off months for I know it has little chance of bearing fruit. I go take a cheap weekend trip to a place I don’t care much about. And since I know I wont remember any of this in my state of mopiness, I maintain a list of things-to-do-on-my-not-so-favorite-day.
And well, its unfair to expect your family or close friends to understand what you’re going through. No one does. And that’s ok. We all knew what we were getting into.
So on the empty days I suggest you put on your favorite jacket and head out to a coffee shop for a few hours. Do your things and then pick a few things off your own things-to-do-on-my-not-so-favorite-day list.
You’ll be not so busy only for so long.
About the author:
Prerna Mukharya, Founder, Outline India
image credit: combatblog
