3 Things I Learned From Trying to Build a Startup
3. Don’t give up the entrepreneurial spirit, as it will be the fuel to start it up again.
I love the word startup.
It means a change. It means a breakthrough. It means openness.
I had this idea of fixing healthcare from the moment I lost my father a week before his medical trip. The trip became a trip of death, not the trip of hope as planned.
Whenever I have to speak up about this experience, I start choking up, whether for a job interview or a podcast. This sadness will never go away.
But I had to find a way to start my life up again. The sadness I had from my personal experience is the fuel of my life.
It is something I will never be able to forget, which therefore will be a reason to live.
I had the idea of creating an app for healthcare coordination with pharmacists as care coordinators back in 2011. Maybe it was my dream solution for the already lost life of my dad. My goal was that I did not want anyone else to go through what my family went through. Period.
I asked my friends to join me to take an elective course to create a business plan in pharmacy school, and we started competing at my school. Then with other schools and MBA students. Then we competed with other students nationwide at South by Southwest (SXSW).
The funny thing was we did not even have the app.
We barely made it to the competition while doing rotations as 4th-year pharmacy students. My teammates were exhausted with a busy schedule of rotations and changing the slide deck again for the 6th time. There was no time to even do mock-ups. The idea of having healthcare coordination at people’s fingertips excited lots of people, however. (This was in the years 2011–2013.) While I had the momentum, I was actually going to carry the plan out for a master’s program’s capstone project I was enrolling in.
God had a different plan for me. I had my third child, and my plans had to change entirely yet again.
I learned so much from the process of creating the business plan and competing and also just by attending SXSW, however. Many people know about the festival for movies and music, but the healthcare innovation portion was just getting noticed. The keynote speaker in 2013 was Elon Musk. So many innovators from all over the world came to SXSW.
Here are 3 things I have learned from the trial and from the interactions I have had with people at SXSW.
- Work on ‘why’ first, then ‘what.’
As mentioned before, I did not even have the app! However, people got my ‘why.’ That mattered in the planning stage and communicated the purpose of what we were offering. ‘What’ was important, of course, and maybe we did not win because of that, as other contestants already had apps, not to mention many were computer engineers and programmers. However, figuring and refining why was so crucial; we asked so many why’s to get to the bottom.
Many digital health solutions lose the site of ‘why’ as companies grow and expand. Part of it is our healthcare systemic brokenness, but many things boil down to one thing: patients. All healthcare solutions, in the end, are for patients. Patients’ voices are nowhere to be found in refining the ‘why’ in many cases. It must be a continuous improvement process as the environment and patients change constantly. My business plan also needed more patient feedback, and I realized the importance as I practiced as a pharmacist after graduation.
2. Don’t be too attached to your idea and find time to help others.
I met Elliot Cohen at SXSW in one of the sessions he was conducting. He and I had conversations about exploring the topics of testing healthcare ideas that might not bring optimum results at the end of the duration, such as clinical trials. He asked if I could help him out for his startup when I shared my dad’s story, that my team did not win the competition, and that I was a graduating pharmacy student. He and ✌TJ Parker had founded PillPack a few months ago — an online dispensing service/pharmacy that packages medications by the time taken for patients, later bought by Amazon. He was kind to offer his busy time to my partner and me to refine what we were doing on top of founding his company even though he knew we were not in situations to join his team or help him out.
The moral of the story is not that I have missed the opportunity to work with them. (This is the most common reaction I get when I share this story, for a good reason.) Finding time to help others within the boundaries is a win-win strategy is what I have gotten from the experience. It combines giving space to help others while allowing your idea to transform from the interaction.
If I was flexible enough about creating the space to help others as Elliot did, my idea might have transformed to be better than what it was, as he had more knowledge and experience about startup. Maybe his idea might have changed too. I was too busy working on my idea and I also felt I did not know enough.
Everyone has something to offer, so don’t be afraid to offer help and create a win-win situation.
Stephen Covey wrote,
“People can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.”
~From The 7 habits of highly effective people
The same principle applies. It is the fine balance of knowing the core value of your idea but being open to change while keeping that value. It will also help if you know who you are as the quote alludes to. Knowing who you are is the ultimate way of being happy as many scholars and thinkers in history have told us, from Socrates to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to keep your sanity while developing the startup.
3. Don’t give up the entrepreneurial spirit, as it will be the fuel to start it up again.
Entrepreneurism is not just about founding a business or company. As members of society, all of us have to sell ourselves at some level or another as we have to work with others. As we navigate businesses’ space, we learn skills and acquire the knowledge necessary to sell ourselves well.
There will be many rejections throughout our lives (like this piece was rejected from one publication but got accepted here), and we will feel like failures. However, if you already have the entrepreneurial spirit, you will have the fuel to start it up again. I sometimes think some employers don’t take advantage of this unique and valuable characteristic of such employees.
The entrepreneurial spirit is fluid and open to changes, which is a crucial characteristic of pivoting continuously.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about such people in his book, Good Business, those who will always find ways to grow proactively no matter how difficult the environment is. This directly relates to his more well-known concept of being in ‘flow’, which naturally puts oneself into growth throughout life. Maybe that is why StartUp Health founder Unity Stoakes emphasized finding the right people for the startup at SXSW.
Bottom Line:
‘Why’ you are working on something is as important as ‘what’; it will be the foundation of the idea and something always to focus on wherever your journey is at. Creating a space to help others while developing and refining the idea can create win-win situations. And even if the idea does not work out, keep up the entrepreneurial spirit as it will be the fuel to start it up again.
Owning up the process, not the results, helped me grow through the experience of the startup trial. Wherever you are on your journey, take the time to appreciate every step. That way, once you get to the destination, you will be happy to move on to the next destination.
