دانلود کتاب استارتاپ برای فروش (Startup to Sold)

Becoming an entrepreneur involves a steep learning curve. If you’re an expert in a certain field, you have to learn about running a business. If you’re a business major, you have to learn about the market niche you want to fill. When I launched the business that became DVD Your Memories, I fell into the first category. But luckily, even before that point, I had the general mentality that I wanted to succeed at whatever I was doing, and that meant learning how to succeed. The lessons that would serve me well later in life started coming hard and fast during my sophomore year in college. Back then, I was always a few hundred dollars away from being broke. If you have ever been broke—I mean really broke, where you can’t afford to go out and eat with your friends or take someone out on a date—you know the kind of broke I’m speaking of. During my sophomore year of college, my bank account balance fell below $100, and I had to move home for nine months to make enough money so I could get back to school. I drove my rusted 1982 Honda Civic wagon from San Diego State University back to my hometown of Davis, California, a suburb of Sacramento. I found my first sales job, standing in front of stores and asking people to sign petitions. If they did, I would get between $0.75 and $1.50 per signature. I’m not a born salesman, and I was never known for having any kind of natural charisma or charm. But when you are forced to make someone like you within a split second, over and over, you can develop the skill of being likable. I had to approach about a thousand people per day. They would be walking up to the store and see me. Within a second, I could see they were silently judging me. And that is how long I had to make an impression. Now, I can’t tell you the secret to making someone like you within one second, but I can tell you that it has something to do with affection and positivity. If I could show myself as affable and nonthreatening, that would go quite a long way. Of course, some people would just pretend they didn’t see me, or they would offer a negative reply they had drummed up while I began to approach them. But the coolest part of this job was noticing the progress. I could see day after day, after thousands of trials, my percentage of signatures going higher and higher, and people stopped ignoring. I learned two valuable lessons during this time. The first was that under the right circumstances, my own efforts were in direct proportion to the amount of money I earned. If I screwed around and took a million breaks, I wouldn’t have very many signatures, and I wouldn’t make much money. But if I worked my ass off and hustled, I could make about $15 to $20 per hour, which at the time was the most money I had ever made. Most jobs available to young people are hourly based, so it doesn’t matter how well you work or how efficient you are, because you will still collect a paycheck. In this way, our brains are trained to do the least possible “work” in the most amount of time. This mindset maximizes your overall advantage. But learning this type of system is what makes average employees, not entrepreneurs. In the brain of an entrepreneur, there is a direct, unavoidable link between the action taken and the reward. The second lesson was how to fine-tune a sales pitch—not only the initial pitch, but my response to customers depending on what they said. In time, I learned how to be prepared for any scenario. For example, if someone told me that they didn’t have time to read the petition, I had a perfect answer—an answer that I had tested over thousands of trials and knew was the most effective.