This journey started two years ago. Before I dive into some of the takeaways from growing my online assets to 1 million page views (in total since I started, with most of the growth in the last year), I want to highlight that everyone has their own bar for success. I don’t view page views as the measure of my success now, but it was my initial goal when setting out on this crazy online expedition.

To think that thousands and thousands of people have read my words and discovered my websites is mind boggling. It is extremely humbling and whenever I receive emails, tweets, or facebook messages about how I’ve helped someone along their journey, it makes all the difficult times worthwhile!

If you want to learn about specifically how I accomplished this, you can send me an email or hit me up on Twitter. Below, I’m going to cover some of the takeaways and realizations I’ve had on this journey.

1. What value do you bring to the world?

In my past ventures, I’ve always thought about “what I want.” Maybe I want thousands of users for a web app product, or to be famous on youtube. This might sound harsh, but the world doesn’t care about what you want.

Both in life and in business, your value is measured by the degree to which you improve other people’s lives.

Your best friends are the ones who have changed your life for the better, or made it so awesome you want to be around them all the time, even if it’s just that feeling of connection or relaxation. Likely, they feel the same way about you.

I think that you can only come from a place of extreme empathy if you want to succeed in business, unless you are lucky. You need to empathize with what people want, understand what they are searching for, or what will truly help get them where they want to be.

This recipe, of first seeking to serve, help, or solve other people’s problems, will eventually allow them to lower their barriers and take your recommendations or advice seriously. They will begin to take a greater interest in you and what you are doing.

It won’t happen for all people that you help in some way, but you don’t need everyone to build a successful business – just a small passionate crowd of customers or users, and a product or service that resonates with them.

2. The Cavalry Isn’t Coming

Before going into this point, I want to preface it by saying that everyone who has supported me on this journey is amazing, even if they have done it in a small way. I got into startups my sophomore year of college and my friends and parents have endured pitch after pitch of new businesses.

While friends and family can offer support, no one is going to build that business for you. Inevitably, some people who might have said they would help out with introductions, investment, or testimonials will flake. It’s important to not be angry about these things. People have busy lives!

When you come to the ultimate truth that you are not a statistical outlier and that no one is going to come to the rescue to make the process of building a business easier, it can be frightening.

I think as humans, we all have the secret hope that things are going to work out by some random turn of events or because we pick the right lottery ticket. The majority of the time, this does not occur.

Boulders don’t push themselves up hills. You have to do it one step at a time.

Over time, I think this was the most liberating realization for me. It made me decide to work my ass off to make things happen and to learn as much as possible about blogging, seo, internet marketing, etc. Mistakes were made, but over time, with continuous work, I progressed and even got lucky in some cases.

3. Are you responsible for the growth?

In my opinion, a lot of entrepreneurs confuse growing a business out of thin air with growing a business in an industry that is already growing. The former example might be when Apple introduced the smartphone. It led to the creation of completely new industries. A latter might be creating an accessory for a 3D Printer.

However, even the smartphone came out of some kind of existing human behavior, communicating across distances with a traditional phone, so the adoption of the smartphone eventually reached a tipping point when it made more sense to buy a smartphone rather than a regular phone, from an economic and feature standpoint.

I guess a truly “out of thin air” business would need to be founded on a new behavior, like taking pictures of your food and sending it to friends, which has not taken place previously throughout the existence of humanity (haha).

Understanding what is driving the growth in your business will help you identify what is driving demand, in an economic sense, within your marketplace. If you don’t understand what is driving demand for a particular product solution, service, or even information in general, it will be very difficult to optimize your growth.

4. A brand is just your reputation

I really hate MBA types who come up with fancy names for branding and what it means. I kept getting told that “business is complicated” when I was starting out, but I’m a firm believer that if you can’t explain a business concept to a toddler, then you just suck at explaining. I guess you need to back up spending all that money on an MBA with sophisticated descriptions.

At the end of the day, your brand is simply your reputation. If you’re an individual, you might have a reputation for being a good person or being a hard worker. These kinds of feelings extend to businesses.

How do you establish a reputation? By consistently and continuously exhibiting the qualities that you want people to share with others! I think reputation is a priceless asset. It has influenced who has reached out to me, done business with me, and interviewed me.

I think this, along with having an awesome product or experience, is the best way to encourage word-of-mouth marketing. It’s certainly helped the growth of my websites.

5. You have a best and worst version of yourself.

You are your own worst enemy in the beginning stages of a business. The way to increase your chances of success is to compensate for those weaknesses with partners or systems that you create.

I’m not only talking about specific skills, like coding ability, marketing, or sales. I’m talking about your emotional mentality. We’ve all had moments when we are “in the zone” and have a super productive week. Other times, it seems like we are going through a bit of a rut, perhaps because of something in our personal life.

I don’t believe that “who we are” is a constant. Under one set of circumstances, like being in a good mood from a run, we might react differently to an external stimulus than if we had spent the entire day on the couch watching movies and eating potato chips.

The important thing is to experiment and then recognize how to put yourself in the best mindset to succeed. How can you bring out the best version of yourself on a daily basis?

This might seem trivial, but once you have invested your life in a dream and have the pressure of having to pay expenses, manage employees, possibly raise money, build a product, and sell it, it’s likely that your emotional mentality will be tested. The highs will be super high and the lows will make you want to crawl under the covers.

Figure out what the “best version” of yourself means and minimize the amount of time that that “other version” appears in your life.

6. Don’t Swim in Your Success or Wallow in Your Failure.

Both of these are dangerous. Your job is to fight the feeling that you’ve “made it” in any way. It’s okay to have a little celebration, but then it’s time to get back on the treadmill and start working to push your limits even further. Otherwise, you might just be surpassed by another runner in the marathon.

Similarly, you are going to experience failure. The important thing is to learn from it and rebound as quickly as possible. There is nothing worse than one small failure causing more!

7. Embrace Serendipity and Do Things You Don’t Want to Do.

I’m one of those guys who tries to figure out everything in their life and how it’s going to happen. I’m going to launch this site and do X and eventually it will be X. I’m going to do this at this age X, etc.

The greatest things in my life haven’t worked that way. The most amazing things have been serendipitous, whether that’s meeting someone at a networking event that leads to a new idea, having someone read my content that I didn’t expect, or seeing success in an area that I didn’t anticipate.

The only rational way I’ve come up with to encourage “luck” “random positive events” or “serendipity” is to do a lot of things you might not normally do. Instead of watching netflix after a long day, go to a networking event on a cool topic you don’t know much about, like Podcasting.

Systematically putting yourself out of your comfort zone and trying things you wouldn’t normally do can lead to great things. At the very least, you can look back and laugh.

This is particularly important if you are a single founder, but it is also just a good tip for life in general. Single founders are confined to the creative and rational nature of their own mind. They don’t have others who are analyzing the same information and who may come up with different ideas or come to different conclusions.

Therefore, by trying things they wouldn’t normally do, or looking at problems in a way they wouldn’t think to be logical, they are more likely to find new ways to add value to their customers or grow their business.

Conclusion

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I’m sure when I look back on this post in a few years time, I’ll think some of these points were weird (haha), but I hope they will help anyone who is trying to launch a new business! If you have any questions, leave a comment or send me an email.