ESYB2 095 - Starting to Consistently Succeed by Helping Others
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[00:00:00] With this video, let's begin talking about the more positive era in my own entrepreneurship experience. And this is around 2010, 2011. At that time, crowdfunding was a really huge industry. It was just getting started. Like, websites like Kickstarter were just getting popular. And so I thought, okay, I'll start a crowdfunding site too and get on that trend.

And my idea was to help entrepreneurs with the things that I struggled with the most, which was not getting the help and support that would otherwise make my entrepreneurship journey much easier. So my idea was to create a brainstorming website for entrepreneurs to brainstorm business ideas so that we can plan the business ideas out better together.

This was of course mistaken because very many entrepreneurs are private about their business ideas and they don't want to share business ideas with others and the idea for my particular website was if some entrepreneurs came together and decided we want to pursue this idea Then, [00:01:00] they would seek funding right on that very same website.

And, that also was a bad idea because you don't want people who have no experience working together, who are dispersed throughout the world. They may not, probably are not the most ideal to start a business together. So this business idea was pretty bad with a lot of mistakes, a lot of holes in that business idea.

And that business ended up dying pretty quickly. But I didn't want to kill it. What I ended up doing was because I was spending some years having some successes, but kind of some failures, I was kind of struggling financially. And I had to get a job. I was like, thinking, okay, my entrepreneurship is failing.

It's already for many years, it's failing. And I'm not making money and my friends who are engineers are making a lot of money because they got their promotions, they got raises, and I'm actually gave myself a demotion and, uh, no money. So, I thought, okay, I'm gonna Look for another job just as a programmer and at that time [00:02:00] mobile apps were very hot and so I thought okay I'm gonna learn mobile app development.

So I rebuilt that same idea for the crowdfunding Into a mobile app just to learn how to make mobile apps so I can say on a resume on a job interview that I Built an app when I was applying for app development jobs But actually that particular app started doing really well in the app store It ultimately got over 2 million downloads because of one feature.

Something I learned earlier in my entrepreneurship journey, to interact a lot with customers and provide great customer support so that I can understand their experience with my product so that I can improve my product that way. And I built Chat into that app so that people can actually chat with me.

You know, with my own app I can build any feature. So I did that. And people were starting to chat with me, and I was starting to help them with their business ideas. And of course, at that time, I wasn't an experienced coach, but still, I was more of a resource than they had, because a lot of the people [00:03:00] were, like, kind of isolated.

You know, sitting in their own room in some town somewhere, or some part of the world, and their family or friends didn't, weren't able to help them. So I was the best resource that they had for free. And I actually helped hundreds and hundreds, and maybe over a thousand people on my app while typing. And I realized that That I'm answering the same questions all the time.

So this is where I started making YouTube videos. To answer the same question only once, and then I could point people to the YouTube videos. So I don't have to retype everything. Because as you can probably guess, it became very boring to type the same answer every day, multiple times a day. Because generally the questions people had were about the same.

Like, how do I raise money? How do I start a business? How do I get business ideas? Those kind of questions. And that was the beginning of my YouTube channel. That was the first. Venture into video, and I was horrible at making videos. I don't know what your opinion is of my videos now, but believe me, they were so much worse before.

And somehow, because I knew SEO and I knew [00:04:00] marketing, my YouTube channel grew, not to a tremendous fame level, but to a level that I didn't realize was possible for me. I think I got something like two plus million views on my YouTube channel that I started then. And I had some, still have something like 35, 000 plus subscribers, so it wasn't that bad.

But then, that video creation led me to Udemy. And I really found something that I love, which was actually helping people who struggle, and teach them so they can leave their struggle. Because for me, that struggle that I had was a long time struggle, because now, 2000 YouTube, I was on YouTube 12, and I started on Udemy in 2013, but notice, my entrepreneurship journey started in the mid 2000s.

Right? It's like 7 years approximately. And even on YouTube, and even my early, my first year on Udemy, I was really struggling financially. I wasn't making a lot of money. [00:05:00] And that really brings me to another really, really important point. Because when you're an entrepreneur, it's almost inevitable that you're going to have financial stress.

When you have this financial stress, it weighs on you so heavily, and it's a really miserable and bad place to be mentally, and it just doesn't go away, it's always there. It forces your decision making to focus only on the short term, to relieve that stress. In my case, it was like making more bad videos, more, let's call them mediocre videos.

More videos, more videos, but more mediocre videos was like, you know, if one video was making a couple of dollars, another video was making a couple of dollars, It's like mediocre plus mediocre will never become good. What would have been more wise would be stop and slow down my video creation and learn and see how can I improve my video creation.

How can I present better? How can I have better visuals? How can I get a better microphone or other equipment so that my audio is better? Every little element, detail, [00:06:00] would have made my videos more successful with potential. I think actually transferring to Udemy ultimately was a better choice for me.

But nevertheless, I could have succeeded like 10x or 100x even maybe if I invested in my own quality, but I couldn't, I couldn't because of the stress. The stress kept me focused on short term, alleviating the short term pain. And if you are going through the stress, here's what I want to share with you, the wisdom that I learned after years.

The decisions we make, they feel important in the now. But if we can disregard the now as hard as it can be and focus on for every decision and every part of your prioritization, answer which thing that I'm going to do is going to help me be more successful in five or ten years. Not help me be more successful now or in a month.

Those are short term decisions. But what will I, can I [00:07:00] do now that will be the most impactful thing? to help me succeed in 5 or 10 years. Because you know what, future comes very fast, and you really do not want to be in the future where you are now. You want to be, like, years ahead. And that's the decision you make.

That decision making, if I had it then, I would have been infinitely more more successful. But I didn't have it then. And it led me to make, like, 6 or 700 low quality YouTube videos, which was a lot of time, and a lot of, is it over a year. So, again, it's a struggle, struggle. I never made a lot of money on YouTube.

The most I made on YouTube was like 350 a month. Even Udemy, when I started, I love teaching, actually, because I really love helping people succeed and overcome challenges that I faced. And, but even that took a while. And the only way I grew that was by focusing on my craft because I started Udemy in something like 2014, and it was really bad.

I didn't realize it then. [00:08:00] and in 2015, I looked back at my 2014 and I thought, wow, you are really bad. But every year, like 2016, I, I looked back at my 2015 and I said, wow, you are really bad. In 2015 and in 17, I looked back and I was like, oh, you're really bad in 16, because I changed in how I operate. I run my day-to-day business.

Of course, it has to be run. New videos have to be made, new courses have to be made, but that has to be balanced with those decisions. What task should I do now? which is going to impact my success in 5 or 10 years. Very often, it's improving how I teach. And slowly, slowly, slowly, I started growing my business on Udemy.

And because I loved Udemy, I actually at some point stopped doing everything else that I did. That's kind of how I got to now. Once I started focusing on only Udemy and growing my Udemy, I started realizing That, oh, I can, I should kill off the other businesses [00:09:00] because they're not priority because they're not going to be there for me in five years.

If I focus more on Udemy, I'll do disproportionately better on Udemy. So in the next video, I want to share with you what happens after you achieve some success, what the path is to become not just moderately successful, but to become the absolute best and most successful in your field.

