I've seen Mark Cuban use "wannapreneur" many times on his show and I've heard others use this term.
I spent a good week trying to figure out what they meant because the term never seemed to correlate to the size of the success of the pitch they were hearing.
At one point someone came in who has built some kind of underwater propulsion device which was the culmination of 3 years of work. He had a pretty polished prototype too and was currently working as an engineer for one of the big 4 tech companies making a large salary. This guy had never tried to actually sell his product to anyone. He just kept building. And I remember again Cuban calling him a "wannpereneur".
At that point it struck me that the apparent definition of wannapreneur is "Someone who wants the trappings of an entrepreneur (ie the social capital, the identity etc) and goes to all the entrepreneur conferences but doesn't actually _find customers_ and try to _sell_ a product to them." Its a threshold of actually putting yourself out there with a product and selling. Thats the line.
By this definition you definitely aren't a wantapreneur. You are an _entrepreneur_ but you haven't found your audience and product yet.
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You have to remember that becoming good at entrepreneurship means being decent at finding cofounders to complement you (ie being easy to work with) and/or being good at a few of the things to do with business: building, marketing, sales, hiring. If you're trying to do evertyhing on your own you have to be at least average in all these areas.
Are you at that point?
If you aren't then find books/courses in those areas and try to become good in those areas (very hard to do) Or find co-founders to complement you.
You're on your way. Keep your income and keep trying with different ideas.
- You talk to people about your ideas, but never build anything
- You build something without first talking to people
- You build something and never try to sell it
If you build something that people say they'll pay for and then they don't actually pay for it then this is problematic, but also normal and doesn't make you a wannapreneur. At that point it's just part of the struggle.
It's the business equivalent of the 'aspiring actor/musician/artist' who never commits to their aspirations for fear of losing them. You can't really fail if you never really try.
True, but hard to adjudicate. The problem is how do you differentiate between people who don't pivot because they think the next feature will make them successful and are justified in doing so, versus people who do the same thing but really should pivot? It's tricky because we have all of the following examples:
- People whose initial idea isn't working, but who pivot and immediately hit product market fit.
- People who launch the exact same thing once a year and it finally becomes a huge hit after the fourth time.
- People who pivot quickly and fail, whereas they would have probably been successful had they pushed the original idea to its logical conclusion.
- People who pivot after five years and become wildly successful, but where it's unclear if they would have been as successful had they had pivoted sooner.
- People who pivot and become successful when they would have been better off shutting down and starting over. (e.g. Derek Sivers)
This hits home a lot for me because I always strongly favor the strategy of building some optionality into the product, both for my own startup and when doing consulting, on the assumption that we're probably directionally correct but may be wrong on some specifics (e.g. how a feature should work, who the early adopters will be, what the economy will be like in the future, what the cash flow of the business will be like on any given day, etc.) And I take a lot of shit both for not committing 100% to one specific product and go-to-market strategy, and also for not pivoting fast enough when something isn't working. Go figure.
An events app which allows you to subscribe to venues for cheaper. Various things like consistent cashflow/breakage go into making to cheaper.
I have the design and developing chops, it's the customer development & validation part I'm bad at. I really need to talk to businesses before I make it, but I'm always apprehensive about actually doing so.
But now this thread has convinced me. After exams, I'm going to send some emails and organise some meetings, and see what people have to say.
> You talk to people about your ideas, but never build anything
Adding to this, you're also a wantrepeneur if you actually manage to start a business but don't end up involved at all in the core product (an "idea person").
A real entrepreneur is able to be or to get salesmen, engineer, finance guy, a marketing guy, etc...
An entrepreneur is someone able to start a company and in a company, you need more than an engineer to build a device, you also need a guy to sale theses devices, a guy to market it and a guy that able to get the capital and do the balance sheet.
Usually finance can be done with time or a mortgage, so we ignore that one pretty often but if you can only build, well if you don't learn the other skills or never find someone to fill theses skills for you, then you can't really start a company, can you?
I mean... how does history not already tell you this? Nearly every person we remember as a historical figure was able to "sell" something to get there. The typical exception to this is the person who did something interesting, but someone else sold it for them after they died.
In the eyes of their lifetimes and most of history, Edison won the Tesla v Edison battle nearly 100%. Edison was a vastly better salesperson.
If you ask the average person who Nikola Tesla was today, they'd probably say something about the car company. Elon Musk sells the name Tesla better than Tesla himself ever did.
If your idea of success is obtaining money or changing hearts and minds, you better learn how to sell (or I guess you could devise a spectacularly dangerous weapon).
I suppose the question at the root of it is: can you determine someone's "entrepreneurialness" completely by looking at their total profit (or maybe total revenue)? Or is there more to it than that?
For instance, Tesla's ideas were used extensively by others to make money. Is the fact that he personally didn't capture that revenue with is own account take away from his "entrepreneurialness" score?
Nikola Tesla as a brilliant engineer and scientist. At one point he was even one of the wealthiest in NY, he didn't get there by being a "loser poser" he got there by making sales after he created his invention. The first installation of AC generators in Niagra falls didn't get there because he accidently fell into it. Make no mistake, Tesla had to be damned good at sales and engineering to get someone to put so much money up and take such a huge risk on Tesla's AC technology. Don't get me wrong, it helped that he had patents, but there was definitely sales involved.
I spent a good week trying to figure out what they meant because the term never seemed to correlate to the size of the success of the pitch they were hearing.
At one point someone came in who has built some kind of underwater propulsion device which was the culmination of 3 years of work. He had a pretty polished prototype too and was currently working as an engineer for one of the big 4 tech companies making a large salary. This guy had never tried to actually sell his product to anyone. He just kept building. And I remember again Cuban calling him a "wannpereneur".
At that point it struck me that the apparent definition of wannapreneur is "Someone who wants the trappings of an entrepreneur (ie the social capital, the identity etc) and goes to all the entrepreneur conferences but doesn't actually _find customers_ and try to _sell_ a product to them." Its a threshold of actually putting yourself out there with a product and selling. Thats the line.
By this definition you definitely aren't a wantapreneur. You are an _entrepreneur_ but you haven't found your audience and product yet.
----
You have to remember that becoming good at entrepreneurship means being decent at finding cofounders to complement you (ie being easy to work with) and/or being good at a few of the things to do with business: building, marketing, sales, hiring. If you're trying to do evertyhing on your own you have to be at least average in all these areas. Are you at that point?
If you aren't then find books/courses in those areas and try to become good in those areas (very hard to do) Or find co-founders to complement you.
You're on your way. Keep your income and keep trying with different ideas.
Best of luck!